Books

What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question throughout the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to Western philosopher Pat Benetar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple: Love is a mix tape.

In the 1990s, when "alternative" was suddenly mainstream, bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M. -- bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV -- were MTV. It was the decade of Kurt Cobain and Shania Twain and Taylor Dayne, a time that ended all too soon. The boundaries of American culture were exploding, and music was leading the way.

It was also when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renee, who was way too cool for him but fell in love with him anyway. He was tall. She was short. He was shy. She was a social butterfly. She was the only one who laughed at his jokes when they were so bad, and they were always bad. They had nothing in common except that they both loved music. Music brought them together and kept them together. And it was music that would help Rob through a sudden, unfathomable loss.

In Love Is a Mix Tape, Rob, now a writer for Rolling Stone, uses the songs on fifteen mix tapes to tell the story of his brief time with Renee. From Elvis to Missy Elliott, the Rolling Stones to Yo La Tengo, the songs on these tapes make up the soundtrack to their lives.

Rob Sheffield isn't a musician, he's a writer, and Love Is a Mix Tape isn't a love song -- but it might as well be. This is Rob's tribute to music, to the decade that shaped him, but most of all to one unforgettable woman.

The story is of the power of music and one tragic loss. The author lost his wife unexpectedly and pieced together a book about their relationship in its before, during and after stages. Each chapter is headed by the tracklisting of a mixtape -- a customized amalgamation of songs, however random -- they had made. I was somewhat under the impression that the chapters would be more about the mixtapes they made together and less mile markers in the chronological tour of their relationship. The songs set the tone (somewhat) for the chapter to come, but there isn't necessarily any cohesion between the song choices themselves and the following few pages.

I understand how difficult it would be to pull that off, but I guess I had pretty high hopes.

Some parts of the book were beautiful in their tribute, but other parts just seemed like simple narrative. There were times when the anecdotes made Sheffield sound like he lived to a ripe old age and here he was remembering his early love. While I am sure we can get into how philosophically much more time passed in his life than ours after she died, he is still a young man. The book may have been cut down by a few pages, in fact all I really needed was some of the set up and the last chapter. In the last chapter it seemed like Sheffield finally let himself feel Renee's absence. Sharing in that, I finally began to feel for him.

For the most part, the book was enjoyable. I would argue that the inclusion of music into the story was a little over done (with countless references, name drops and lyrics spread throughout the book), but apparently that was how Rob and Renee lived. Those were the conversations they had.

The feeling I had the most while I read was that his story was a private one. I felt that he needed to write the book for his closure, to preserve her memory and to give himself perspective. While I am honored that he shared Renee with us all, I couldn't help but feel that I was intruding on something that was special to the two of them.

As previously mentioned, the final chapter could live and breathe on its own. The emotion that finally pulsed through those last few pages just about made up for its conspicuous absence earlier in the book. I never read achnowledgements, especailly when they are more than a paragraph but I read these. The last chapter spilled over into them and I couldn't help myself. I wanted to see the final goodbye and thank you written to Renee. After thanking everyone who helped write the book, I wanted to have my heart ripped out by a simple homage to Renee who will now live on forever in text. But while she was mentioned in the acknowledgements, she was never thanked. But then again, maybe that part was just too personal.

Its story, while sometimes buried under excessive music references, was sweet. The book was short; at 219 pages it is short enough to try it even if you aren't sure about it. All in all, Love is A Mix-Tape was a decent book.

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