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Now an editor and columnist at Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield is one of the wisest and wise-crackingest music critics on the planet. I first became a fan of his and Renée's writing in the nineties music fanzines, Radio On and Why Music Sucks (the two of them also figure prominently in the Spin Alternative Record Guide), and when I heard through a friend a few months back that Sheffield was writing a book about mix tapes, I expected it would be very funny and full of crackling musical insights. In neither respect does he disappoint. What I wasn't fully prepared for, however, was something so intensely personal and heartbreaking. The book is subtitled "Life and Loss, One Song At a Time" but an old Smokey Robinson & the Miracles title would suffice: "I Gotta Dance to Keep From Crying."
Befitting its underlying premise—that a good mix tape can change your life in a way that perhaps only love itself can—each chapter opens with a song list from Sheffield's personal stash of C90s. The music on the cassette is not "reviewed," per se, and in some chapters it's referred to only fleetingly. Rather, each tape provides a springboard for the story Sheffield tells, though some of the stories do in fact revolve around the music from the tape.
The book starts with some painful and hilarious recollections of a '70s adolescence, pithily summarized by Sheffield's confession that, "The words 'douche' and 'bag' have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my 13-year-old self." A minor breakthrough occurs in the mid-'80s when Sheffield goes to college and has an exciting, if ill-fated, romance with a mutual R.E.M. fan (fittingly, that chapter's "breakup tape" opens with "It's the End of the World as We Know It"). In 1989, his world is turned upside down forever by Renée, a punk rock-loving Southern girl whose voice, in Sheffield's words, "was full of the frazzle and crackle of music." The entire middle section of the book follows the couple through courtship and marriage—spontaneous, crazy, bumpy, and wonderful—until a terrible turn of events in May 1997, when Renée suffered a pulmonary embolism and died on the spot, in her husband's arms. The remainder of the book has Rob slowly piecing his life back together.
Throughout the entire story, music plays on, but it's far too loud to call it mere "background." Nirvana, Biggie Smalls, Pavement (Renée: "There's a lot of room underneath my dress for these boys") and all the other shared pop obsessions recounted either in passing or in detail operate in this book much like "Be My Baby" in Mean Streets or "Sister Christian" in Boogie Nights: They're the hooks that draw you in and the flavours that keep you coming back for seconds. In fact, the musical arc Love Is a Mix Tape follows is a great story unto itself.
Given Sheffield's age (41), the tunes reflected upon in the early chapters of his life are a not-unexpected mixture of Beatles, '70s pop metal and new wave (i.e., Gerry Rafferty), with a few brave stabs at disco in the hopes of inducing his female classmates to the dance floor. By the time Renée's in the mix, the tapes more often than not lead off with a punk tune—except for the one that leads off with a Vanessa Williams tune—and whirr their way to destinations as far afield as George Jones and 2 in a Room ("We thought 'Wiggle It' was the biggest hit in the world. It wasn't."). Some of the later mixes understandably contain their share of the most longing sort of pop songs imaginable, while others, with their blend of Hanson, Sleater-Kinney, White Town and Liz Phair, underline the book's central musical argument, that the '90s, in all its grungy glory, was the most perfect of pop decades, the "decade of Kurt Cobain and Shania Twain and Taylor Dayne and Brandy Chastain"—the decade, incidentally, in which fate granted the author his greatest hits and most bittersweet memories, a dichotomy captured to perfection in a moving soliloquy to the wikka wikka windshield-wiper beat of Missy Elliott's "The Rain."
The book's most affecting moments have the young couple singing along in the car (they do a lot of driving around together) to their favorite songs. Duets are their specialty. After a botched attempt at "She's Gone," an argument breaks out over who's supposed to be Hall and who's supposed to be Oates, a comic misunderstanding that's much shorter but no less funnier than Abbott & Costello arguing about first and second base. In what may be the book's most blissful passage of all, Renée, after a spirited version of "Midnight Train to Georgia," tells Rob the words that any self-respecting man would give his right arm to hear a woman intone: "You make a good Pip." Hearing those words sends Rob into the stratosphere, where you, the reader—a backseat witness to some of the greatest conversations about pop music ever captured between covers—will happily join him.