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Rob Sheffield Answers Your Questions

Posted Oct 18, 2007 10:35 AM

Readers asked Pop Life columnist Rob Sheffied questions, and he responded. Read more of the Pop Life here.

If you had to choose one song to sum you up — one song as your kind of anthem of the moment — what would it be?

LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends." I first heard this at their Bowery Ballroom show in March — also the first time I ever heard "North American Scum" or "Someone Great" or "No Love Lost." (That was quite a night.) He's just trying to rewrite David Bowie's "Heroes," an impossible feat nobody else would be daft enough to try, yet the way it builds and builds, going nowhere, with all these stupid sentimental howls and disco keyboards and only one chord if I'm counting right — well, it just kills me. Franz Ferdinand's version is almost as great.

I've seen LCD Soundsystem do this song in different settings, from Coachella to Greenpoint's Studio B, but it always tells me something good. The words don't make much linear sense but they're not supposed to. One thing about Irish guys — they sure do like to get drunk and miss their friends and say dumb things like "We set controls for the heart of the sun, it's one of the ways we show our age" or "if they ask about Charlemagne, be polite and say something vague" or "I wish I could escape from the old main drag" or "my aim is true" or "if I venture in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream." I guess it's in our DNA. Anyway, I never get sick of this song and I'll play it the rest of my life whenever I want to remember 2007, which I will.

If you were given one weeknight where you could put eight thirty-minute sitcoms from any era on TV, what would they be? And which episodes?

Welcome Back, Kotter: Choosing one episode of this show is like picking a favorite pint of blood in my heart. But I'm going with the one where Horshack boxes Carvelli.

Sanford & Son: Fred goes to a Japanese restaurant. "More fish eyes, Mr. Sanford?"

Chico and the Man: Chico has jury duty.

Good Times: Florida wants to be a bus driver.

Mr. T and Tina: Ted "Isaac the Bartender" Lange is the janitor who comes to fix Pat "Arnold" Morita's plumbing. "Mr. T, what's going down?" "Not much."

Grady: Whitman Mayo gets into health food, tries to make his own carrot juice.

Married . . . With Children: Al's Labor Day barbecue where he accidentally makes burgers out of Marcie's dead aunt's ashes ? best TV cannibalism ever!

What's Happening: Rerun vs. the Doobie Brothers, obvs. Takin' it to the streets!

When American Idol reveals that a singer is voted off, why do they make them then sing the song that all the voters hated AGAIN?

You're right, dude — that shit is cold. Nietzsche: "It is not the Christian's charity but his lack of charity that keeps him from burning us."

Who do you think is the most overrated band? Most underrated? And who did you think would be huge but never made it?

Most overrated: Metallica, definitely. They have the right image, the right look, the right name, the right logo, the right attitude, so nobody really minds they have no songs, no singers, no chops, no tunes, no beats, no riffs, no hooks, no originality, no imagination. The guitarist has some nice solos, but if he had his own ideas he'd have his own band. By all accounts they're sweet guys, and they treat their fans well, so nobody wants to be the meanie who points out how laughable the music is; it's like there's a gentleman's agreement not to dispute the point. It's kind of touching how everybody takes them seriously just for meaning well. I'm sure I'm just wrong, and I wouldn't dream of trying to change anyone's mind, any more than I'd tell my nieces there's no Easter Bunny. They're always going to be the world's biggest band, they're always going to sound the same, and everybody's fine with that, including me.

Underrated: I worship The Auteurs, not they ever could have been huge, but given that it was the early Nineties, and arty guitar bands from London ripping off Bowie and the Smiths were at an all-time high of popularity, I'm surprised more people still haven't heard of them. Those first two records, New Wave and Now I'm a Cowboy, are just about perfect: "Bailed Out," "Valet Parking," "I'm a Rich Man's Toy," "American Guitars," "Modern History," "New French Girlfriend," so many more. For more Luke Haines, Baader Meinhof's "There's Gonna Be An Accident" and Black Box Recorder's "It's Only the End of the World" aren't shabby either. In fact, I'm surprised they're not ridiculously overrated, besides by me.

Never made it: Billie Ray Martin's 1995 Eurosleaze disco epic, Deadline For My Memories, barely got released here, but anybody who likes big hair and bad taste should treasure "Space Oasis," "Big Tears and Makeup" or "Deadline for My Memories." That last song is such a powerhouse I can only listen to it once a year. Billie Ray Martin: Queen for a night, forever.

Rob, you declare the winner:
1) Pete Doherty vs. Courtney Love
2) Dane Cook vs. Jimmy Fallon
3) Pamela Anderson vs. Charo
4) Paula Abdul vs. Britney Spears

(1) Courtney was a better singer (catch me in the right mood and I'll argue she influenced Kurt's singing as much as he influenced her songwriting) and she got her name on more good tunes, but since neither can claim they wrote their greatest hits and neither has a central nervous system you'd wish on a jellyfish, the edge goes to Pete, as "Don't Look Back Into the Sun" was merely three years ago, while "Miss World" was thirteen.

(2) Jimmy Fallon, on the strength of his Van Morrison impression on the St. Patrick's Day 2001 show. That shit was funny.

(3) No contest! Charo coochie-coochies Pam back into the stone age, but best wishes to the newlywed anyway. Pam, you and Rick Solomon just scream "well thought-out match." 2 gether 4 ever 8 days a week!

(4) I played "Cold Hearted" back to back with "Gimme More," and I'm tossing the Vicodin cookie to the Paula side of the pool. Sorry, Britney.

What are your top albums and movies of the 2000's (so far)?

My two most-played albums of the decade are the Hold Steady's Almost Killed Me and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Fever To Tell. Both are way ahead of whatever's third. The rest: LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver, Missy Elliott's This Is Not A Test (sentimentally I prefer Under Construction, but I listen to TINAT ten times as much), the first two Franz Ferdinand albums (especially the second), the first two Interpol albums (especially the first), the White Stripes' Elephant and White Blood Cells, Erase Errata's Nightlife, Blood Brothers' Young Machetes, Stephen Malkmus' Pig Lib, Jay-Z's The Blueprint, Hot Chip's The Warning, Mountain Goats' Tallahassee, Radiohead's Kid A, Ghostface's Fishscale, the other Hold Steady and YYYs albums. It's a phenomenal time for music, that's for sure. Fuck if I know why. Most of the greatest second albums in history have been released in the past five years.

Movies: Dodgeball, Anchorman, Zoolander, Starsky and Hutch, White Chicks, Best In Show, Soul Plane, Riding Giants, Dogtown and Z-Boys, Not Another Teen Movie, Phat Girlz. . . If you could mix a two-hour loop of Austin Scarlett and Santino scenes from Project Runway, that would be Number One. I cried at the end of Dude, Where's My Car? (the part when Stifler says, "Dude, there's your car") but that's just because I'm an idiot.

I've often contended that "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" is THE perfect dance song. Is there a song that you feel is a perfect dance song, and if so, what makes it perfect?

I forgot about that one. My fave Whitney song was always "So Emotional" ("I don't know why I like it . . . I JUST DO!"). On Saturday night I heard it in the men's room of a burrito joint in Poughkeepsie, and it really made me want to dance with somebody, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Off the top of my head, as of today and right now, the perfect dance song is Eve's "Gotta Man," from the summer of 1999 — it sounds like a jump rope rhyme (I wish I could jump rope) where you jump up but don't come back down, you just float on the breeze and turn into a new song. The words are cool ("Pawn my ice for the bail, spending nights in jail, drawing hearts on the wall with our names around the cell") but the words dissolve in the drum loop. The next day, I wake up and I think it was all a dream — until I find the paw-prints tattooed on my chest. Eve was here, bitch!

What Latin music do you like?

A few weeks ago I was driving to the airport in Arizona and I was spinning the radio dial until I found Yndio's "Linea Telefonica," which I had never heard before. It blew my pitiful little brain and it was on my hard drive by that night. I've listened to it a million times since then — Mexican versions of ELO songs are genius by definition.

One of my all-time favorite songs is Alaska Y Dinarama's "Ni Tu Ni Nadie," Madrid new wave glam-rock from 1985, a hit in Mexico City discos that summer. . .YouTube that band and you might like what you see. Mecano are one of my fave Eighties synth-pop groups. I like reggaeton (Wisin Y Mandel's "Rakata"), cumbia, plus pop stuff like Selena and the Eighties Latina girlie-disco explosion out of Miami and New York, singers like Corina and Lisette Melendez and Expose and 2 in a Room.

What's your feel-good hit of the fall?

Prince's "Let's Pretend We're Married," but that was also my feel-good hit of the spring and summer. "Whoo-eee Zsa Zsa cuckoo yeah, all the hippies sing together," et cetera. If I had to pick a favorite album of all time, right this second, it would probably be 1999, the ultimate new wave album, the ultimate 1982 album, the ultimate album of that Dare/Kissing To Be Clever/Thriller moment when music turned upside down for me. I've been listening to Controversy and Lovesexy more than usual 7#8212; my friend Gavin made me a CD with the Lovesexy songs split up into separate tracks, so I've been rediscovering how great those songs are. I never really seized on "Glam Slam" or the title song before but I've been playing them like crazy. This summer I went to see Purple Rain outside in McCarren Park Pool and it was funny how everybody sang along with "The Beautiful Ones" and "Darling Nikki." Lake Minnetonka!

What are the greatest live shows you've seen this year, and what was the high point of each? Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 8/7: "Kiss Kiss"
LCD Soundsystem, 5/12: "All My Friends"
Hold Steady, 1/18: "You Can Make Him Like You"
Sonic Youth, 7/28: "Hey Joni"
White Stripes, 6/24: "We're Going To Be Friends"
CSS, 6/1: "I Wanna Be Your J. Lo"
Franz Ferdinand, 6/13: "Turn It On"
Grinderman, 6/24: "Honey Bee, Let's Fly To Mars"
Beastie Boys, 8/10: "Hello Brooklyn"
Thurston Moore, 9/26: "Psychic Hearts"
Erase Errata, 4/7: "He Wants What's Mine"
Blood Brothers, 4/2: "Camouflage, Camouflage"
Interpol, 6/5: "PDA"
Liars, 9/14: "Plaster Casts of Everything"
Patrick Wolf, 4/6: "Moon River"
Of Montreal, 3/10: "Bunny Ain't No Kind Of Rider"
The 1990s, 4/4: "You Made Me Like It"
Erasure, 8/3: "Victim Of Love"
Team Dresch, 6/22: "Fagetarian and Dyke"
!!!, 5/30: "Bend Over Beethoven"
Jarvis Cocker, 4/23: "State Trooper"
The Hives, 10/9: "Main Offender"

What a year. It'll get even better in a couple weeks if Morrissey doesn't lame out again.

What artist's music saved your life? (For me, it's Madonna.)

Madonna's up there for me too. I can't say anybody's music saved my life from anything in particular, but she changed the way I thought about music and life and Jesus and Mary and Joseph and lots of other things. "Live To Tell" is kind of a forgotten Madonna song, but that one, "Dress You Up," "Angel," "Crazy For You," "Gambler," "Burning Up," those are *huge* for me. I always do "Justify My Love" at karaoke but I never quite get it seductive enough.

After reading your book Love Is a Mix Tape, I wonder if you still love cassettes.

Definitely. There is no sound-bearing medium I don't love. MP3s are the new cassingles. (Same price, too ? ninety-nine cents!) Ringtones are the new three-inch CD singles that everybody laughed at for a couple months in 1988.

Some "High Fidelity" questions for you, Rob:
Top 5 Bowie songs?

"Station To Station," "Young Americans," "Moonage Daydream," "Life On Mars?" and "Boys Keep Swinging."

Top 5 Beatles songs?

"I Want To Hold Your Hand," "And Your Bird Can Sing," "Eight Days A Week," "It's All Too Much," "Ask Me Why." (Ask me this six times and you'll get six different answers, obviously, but that's where I'm at today.)

What are your Top 5 favorite guilty pleasure songs?

I'm kicking this one over to Oscar "I'm the Kids in America" Wilde: "No civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is." That said, please don't tell anybody I have Milla Jovovich's "The Gentleman Falls" on my ipod.

Read more of the Pop Life here