Mixtape Review: Introduction/ Boring Personal History

When I was in middle school, all baggy pants and skate shoes and terrible, terrible haircuts, I treated mixtapes like rare and powerful magic. I invested absurd amounts of time into crafting them, spent hours sitting on the floor of my room beside the stereo and all my cd's, with notes and plans sketched into my school notebooks, songlist planned out during Mr. Novak's social studies class, with a handful of edits from study hall. I designed perfect little snapshots of my heart, and then left them in the lockers or bags of friends, or girls I liked, so that they could hear what I heard and feel what I felt. And when I got a mixtape, I analyzed every song for personal meaning, listening for some kind of message, some clue to the feelings this person had for me. And the songs, on tapes both incoming and outgoing, were often rubbish, because we were kids with terrible, terrible taste. Once, after a brief courtship in which the young lady in question moved away, I closed out a tape I mailed to her with this gem. Ouch. In my defense, I was 12, and she liked this song.

I carried on like this all through high school, taste inevitably improving (though some would argue that, I'm sure), still quietly and studiously working out song orders and adjusting levels to match the volumes of independent and/or local releases, loud, slick-mainstream production, and the muffled things recorded off the radio, increasingly from this show. I made mixes to introduce my friends to new bands, new types of music, to make a point about some band or other, and sometimes (still) to communicate feelings. I made friends who did the same, and I can honestly say that most of my musical loves of the time were introduced to me via the mixtape, and I loved the way it gave everything context. I still remember which friends gave me which tapes, and sometimes why, and in a few lucky cases, I still have those tapes, and these almost always have stories.

And then I entered college, and got a computer, and put a metric ton of music on it. Someone showed me how itunes worked, and that was it. I still made mixes for people all the time, and I still do now, occasionally, but the effort required is so reduced as to be nonexistent: the computer will match the levels for you, and you never need pen and paper to plan things out, and--and this may be the biggest problem--you don't even have to listen to the song while it burns. You don't have to sit on the floor, and agonize over every line, and wonder if the song you carefully picked out for this person says too much or too little, because it takes so little time. You just drag it onto the list, and it goes on the cd. You mess with the order for ten minutes or so, and then you hit burn, and the whole thing takes 30 minutes. For someone who used to stay in nights to make one tape for one friend instead of going out to do whatever it is teenagers do, this should be a liberating, freeing thing, but I can't really see that. I feel so much more disconnected from my music than I used to, so much less possessive or proud of my collection. No one needs their friends to recommend things, really, because itunes will do that for you, based on what you own already, and how you rate things, and that's a complex system worked out (presumably) by experts. Gone is that personal context, and the thrill of discovery, and the long nights with a stereo and a rug. Do I sound a little codgery? A little embittered by the march of technology? I suppose I do, probably, but this is a blog on the internet, so I'm a little with it still, right? Regardless, I'm sure you're wondering where this is all going. This week, Clinchpin is going to try something fun, hopefully. I've a stack of mixtapes, home-brewed by strangers, probably ten or more years old, all purchased from thrift stores in the area, and we're going to review the heck out of them. I doubt that this will take the serious, moody tone of this way-too-long, call-the-waaambulance, you-kids-get-off-my-lawn post that this one turned out to be, so maybe check these out. I'll list the songs, and hopefully find them online, and then we can talk about if these particular mixes are any good. I've a quick guess: no. I'm probably just trying not to get my hopes up, but we'll see. First on the docket: Nan's Eclectic Favorites. Stay tuned.


UPDATE: A little sniffing around on the internet turned up this article, which says many of the same things except with quality writing, and a quote, from Geoffrey O'Brien, in which the personal mixtape is declared "the most widely practiced American art form." I don't know anything about Geoffrey O'Brien, except that he apparently has written a book with Jeffrey Clark, who is a poet who wrote another book that I quite liked.