Love is a Mix Tape - Life and Loss, One Song at a Time **

By Rob Sheffield.
Published 2007 by Three Rivers Press, Crown Publishing Group a division of Random House.
224 pages.

This is a memoir written by a writer that contributes to Rolling Stone magazine.  Basically, it's about how he fell in love and then lost that love to a pulmonary embolism.  All this while living, loving and dieing to his (and her)  favorite music.  So the premise is that each chapter starts with a play list which introduces the time period which the author wished to present, and then he follows with the narrative.  It's a neat idea, but something doesn't work.

The first chapter bothered me a bit.  It kept trying to make these poetic comparisons to pop songs and life.  It seemed that he had to really stretch to make those throw away pop lyrics connect to his bigger ideas.  It kept trying to be profound even though most of the music wasn't.  Maybe if he had different music it might have worked (more on that later).  Thankfully, he did not keep this method up for long.  For the most part, he just used the mixes as a time marker and didn't really try to show the significance of the song to his life, which I preferred.  After his wife, Renee, dies he does return to this concept a bit because he's dealing with death and sorrow, so I think the book dips in quality here.  Again he has to stretch some pretty silly lyrical content to get to his deeper and more profound thoughts and ideas. 

I'm a mix tape maker, so this should be right up my alley.  I think I was turned off by his taste in music.  Now I am a pretty hard customer to please, but I must say that much of his taste was pedestrian.  And when he tries to make connections to this mostly pedestrian music, it doesn't work for me.  The high moments he had was when he listed Roxy Music and Tindersticks.  But by his own admission, he really liked the pop radio music.  He claimed that the thought other cool music people looked down on this kind of music and so he tried to make himself look better or cooler for liking it.  Now there is the school of thought that some music could be so bad, that it's good, but he has too much ordinary musicians listed to use that as an excuse.  Even the alternative music he likes is really boring stuff.  He's a big fan of Big Star and Pavement.  All the alternative stuff he names is mainstream in the alternative culture.  Stuff that's at best ok, but nothing special. Near the end, I do like how his taste has grown.  He started to listen to old country and rock and roll, so he does seem to be opening up in his tastes. I guess I really had a hard time relating since i disagreed with his taste so often.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that this guy put him self out there, and while I don't dislike him, I don't really like him.  He should be cooler since he's a music writer, but what do you expect?  He writes for Rolling Stone, not exactly the mouthpiece for non mainstream music.

Here's an excerpt.