mix tapes

As I was browsing around Barnes & Noble's music book section, an oddly shaped, colorful book caught my eyes. A brief look at mix tape 'culture'.

I'm just young enough (or old enough, depending on your own age and perception) that cassette tapes were the main media for music when I was a kid. Records were quickly becoming a thing of the past. Cassettes were more durable. They were portable - you could play them in your car if you had the money for a tape deck. And, as the aforementioned book celebrates, you could make your own copies and share them with friends.

I can still hear my brother playing his Beastie Boys tape across the basement where we both had bedrooms, back when I was just getting old enough to pay attention to 'popular' (including rap, rock, etc.) music . I vividly remember sitting in my room, painted robin egg blue, in 6th grade and hearing R.E.M. for the first time ("Stand"). In 7th grade I met Jim on the bus, who talked about The Who and Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones. I had some other friends into the Cure, the Dead Milkmen, even Skinny Puppy. Every time I had to go with my mom to K-Mart for something, I'd spend my time digging into the completely unorganized music bins looking for the music these people talked about. I remember the joy at finding the Cure's Disentigration and listening to it so much it started to wear out.

By 9th grade, CDs were taking over as the preferred media and I even received my own CD player as a Christmas gift. That's the same year my friend Brandon handed me a CD of Nirvana's Nevermind and promised I'd never heard anything like this before. Even though CDs were the standard, burning your own wasn't an option the way it is today. People didn't even have the internet at their homes yet. Most of the cars my friends and I drove were equipped with tape decks. So mix tapes were the way to go. The summer mixes, the chilled out mixes, the mixes for the friend you had the mad crush on, the mix that your friend gave you...

If you've ever made a mix tape (or even a mix CD) you know the time it takes to put into it. Choosing just the right songs by the perfect artists. Arranging them in an order that makes sense and conveys your message. Reaching a balance between classics and new music. Filling the tape and not cutting songs off. High Fidelity, the book and the movie, both discuss this. I think that making mix tapes was a rite of passage for teens and young adults between 1980-1996 or so.

The book states in the introduction: "...and before long, there were warning stickers on records and cassettes, stating: HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC! It was a quaint forbear to today's industry paranoia over CD-burning and Internet downloading." I don't own an iPod (yet), but it just seems like the next step in sharing music. You don't get to decorate your playlist the way you might a cassette tape, but sharing the music is essentially the same.

I'm feeling nostalgic for mix tapes. The good news for me is that I drive a smashed up 1996 Buick Regal with a tape deck, and it's about time I made myself a new mix tape to play in honor of summer. Suggestions welcome in the comments. I'll also be checking out Art of the Mix for some inspiration.