Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape

I just read a memoir that the mass of my Charlottesville friends (and my little sister) have been raving about for months–Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield. Rob used to live in Charlottesville with his wife Renee [Rob, did you eventually get annoyed at all the accented e‘s you had to insert into Renee’s name when you wrote this book? By the end, were you cursing her parents for giving her a name that consumes extra typing time on an American keyboard? I ask because I don’t know how to insert one accented e into Renee’s name, and you had to insert about a thousand. Then again, if my BBF was from South Africa and had a Xhosa click in his name, I’d probably find a way to incorporate it into our love story.] [Maybe I should save these burning questions for your book signing on Tuesday.] [January 22nd, 5:30 pm at New Dominion Bookstore].

You might guess from the title that Love Is a Mix Tape abounds in pop culture references. Rob drops names of songs and their authors, B movies and their stars, fanzines and their Corner Parking Lot writers, chain restaurants and their steaks. I expected this proliferation of names to annoy me, but it didn’t. In the context of the book, the names fit. The pop culture references were always the common ground between Rob and his wife, what brought them together when he was a Boston Irish boy and she an Appalachian girl, and it makes sense that he should use them to draw in the reader as well. And we all miss the 90s.

This book is sad, and it’s populated throughout by people who were sad: Kurt Cobain, Jackie Kennedy, Virginia Woolf, Rob. And sometimes by sad pop music (I know I’m not the only girl who has cried to Cruel Summer by Bananarama). And even the Brooklyn kitchen cabinet stocked full of dance party mix tapes is sad, because many of the songs were selected by Renee, whom Rob loved and still loves, even though she’s gone. Rob gives great depth and substance not only to his rock and roll marriage, but also to every relationship that is informed by pop, that thrives on pop. Love is greater than we are; so great that we need to harness great songs and great poems and occasionally even Applebee’s and Hall & Oates to tell its story.