Published by: The Daily Mississippian
Issue date: May 28, 2008
Section: Arts & Life
The New York Times bestseller, “Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time,” by Rob Sheffield goes above and beyond the expectations of an offering to the supreme power that is pop culture. With multiple references to indie rock bands like Souxsie, pop groups like Hanson and gangsta rap like Notorious B.I.G., this memoir of love, grief and acceptance will not fail to disappoint even the most critical music enthusiast.
While “Love is a Mix Tape” may seem like a relatively shallow maxim dedicated to the influential phenomenon of pop culture, as the reader digs deeper through the author’s written past – each chapter categorized with a mix tape playlist he has kept over the years – Sheffield, a rock journalist, makes sure to abandon any predisposed cliché stereotypes.
By offering such mantras as, “When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free,” or, “Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life,” or, “I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history,” the author very clearly recites his exuberance and heartache as each chapter of his life makes its way to anonymous eyes.
Mostly set around Sheffield’s experiences with his first wife who died in his arms due to a pulmonary embolism, he recounts his childhood and ex-girlfriends with little fervor as he does his wife, Renee, and their shared mistress, the music.
Sheffield weaves the reader through insightful passages about Renee’s zest for life, unassuming na’veté and Appalachian background, introducing and becoming acquainted with his espoused. The reader can hear Renee laugh, shout, whisper, cry. The reader can see her falling to the floor, dying, while simultaneously visualizing Sheffield’s surprise, grief, heartache and denial when the paramedics patiently tell him his wife of not even 10 years has died.
“Mix Tape” pulls at the heartstrings of the reader, yet manages to throw quirky references to bands and songs that the reader almost skips over due to Sheffield’s sly writing style. (His annotation of musical works, however, would be much more substantial if a CD were included with the book, giving the reader a way to somehow play catch-up with Sheffield’s ever-moving brain, which he describes as, “always racing to catch up on my next favorite song.”)
Nevertheless, Sheffield’s attention disorder is the perfect summer read for a college student. It offers depth and hilarity, which keeps the reader entertained and stimulated, but it flows more like a novel and less like a stodgy autobiography tantamount to a textbook – a feat seldom accomplished by today’s writers.
In the world of blogs, Web sites and MySpace, one rarely feels the need to read about another person’s life – after all, the publishing world was made free by the Internet; however, Sheffield’s book revives the notion that other peoples’ stories need to be heard, not in short blurbs, but in book form.
Sheffield’s existential journey gives the readers hope of new love. He falls in love with another woman and lives a new life in Brooklyn away from his Southern one in Charlottesville. He knows his life will never be the same by explaining his pain in terms of music: “I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music and that some of the music we’d loved together I’d never be able to hear again.”
Sheffield practically apologizes to the readers for abandoning this great music, almost as if he was justifying turning away from his own child. “Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all tunes get to move on with you,” he writes. The baggage of memories and music are forever tied together for Sheffield when he fails to “fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.”
Music to Sheffield is more than a tool to drive away silence. To him, music allows “emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.”
Nothing can compare to a mix tape, Sheffield repeats throughout his stories again and again. Instead, he proclaims that “nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do.”
For Sheffield, some of the music is painful to remember, but is revived by the new people in his life, who revive his hope and force him to wipe the fresh grief from his exterior and try to move on from the tragic ending to his premature marriage.
Sheffield’s poetic reverence for music brings back a time of high school loves and college heartbreaks, when he romantically says, “When we all die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”
With Sheffield, it all comes back to love’s meaning and purpose, which, for him, will always be wrapped up with a neat little label as a mix tape.
