A review by mistressofroses
Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield

4.0

This is a wonderful tribute to the author's wife, music lover and exchanger of many mix tapes, who died suddenly at a very young age. Sheffield clearly lived through the mix tapes that make up the themes to his chapters--and if you lived through the '90s in America, even though he's a little bit of an underground rocker who also loves the hits, his references will add a nice flavor to all the stories about his life. Each chapter begins with the tracklisting of a mix tape, and just looking at those titles alone made me a little nostalgic--as well as the idea of mix tapes in general (Sheffield tells the story of a friend, for example, who had a two-sided tape of nothing but Rock Me Amadeus repeats that she had taped off the radio). It's a part of the culture that may be all but lost, since there's not really the work put into doing a mix tape now that there used to be; all that thinking, and starting and stopping and rewinding, and trying to find somewhere quiet in a family house to tape those snippets of who you thought you were at the time to give to someone who you thought was important, who you thought really needed to know you.

It's also a wonderful tribute to that era, evoking so many things that in some cases people have forgotten against the backdrops that time has not (there is, for example, an entire chapter about how the author's life events just happened to coincide, in part, with the death of Kurt Cobain); and to the music that brought together a generation of socially stunted weirdos through the medium of one-hit wonders that should have never happened...and to the music that lives forever.