I so make the best
mix tapes. Seriously. Give me 60 minutes of your time and I’ll show you where
it’s at, and how to get there. That is, if you really like your mix tapes
chockfull of Mike Patton noise projects balanced by a smattering of
Brownesville Station, with a nod to Charlie Parker, showing you where the
aforementioned “it” came from.
           Mix tapes
have been music lovers’ form of communication for years. Indeed, it was the
Beastie Boys who chimed in ’92: “Life ain’t nothing but a good groove / a good
mix tape to put you in the right mood.”
           Finding
old mix tapes is like opening an old photo album. They are the soundtracks to
our daily lives, compilations of our personal music collections’ greatest hits.
It isn’t hard to find someone who professes to make the world’s best.
           Mixes come
in all shapes and sizes. I prefer the battered, lousy-sounding 60-minute
cassette that will be adorned with my own title (Solace for Humbert, for example). But with the advent of the
digital age, mix CDs are everywhere, and bear fancy Photoshopped covers. (I’ve
been to an increasing number of weddings where mix CDs of the newlyweds’
favorite songs are given as gifts.) And the iPods attached to everyone’s belt
seem to bastardize the art (meaning they make the poorer of us jealous) by
carrying around eight Tranzor Z’s worth of mix tapes.
           “I think
there are several reasons why people make mix tapes,” says Abby Danhart, a
friend who once sent me a mix tape for my birthday titled Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers,
for which she included 20 pages of penned literature on the importance of each
song. “To introduce someone to new music, for a fun occasion, like a long road
trip… and of course, the ever dangerous: to express feelings to someone without
being totally direct.”
We’ve all done it
at one point or another: You get a significant other and try to let your mix
tape do the talking. John Cusack’s Rob Gordon of High Fidelity said it best: “You’re using someone else’s poetry to
express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.” A girl in high school once
gave me a cassette and all it had on it was Styx’s “Babe.” I’d like to snub my
nose at this, but it was I who left GN’R’s “Patience” on a tape at my college
girlfriend’s door when things were getting rocky.
           Or consider
the plight of my friend Rizmo, who lives in New Orleans. Riz computes his mix
tapes down to the last second and arranges them with the care that you might
find a nuclear physicist using. I asked him a few questions via email about his
obsession with the form. He replied with a four-page letter.
           “I feel
like an expert on the subject,” he says. “It is a process I enjoy, but also
take somewhat seriously. I have found that the most interesting mix tapes are
the ones I’ve made for others, none of which seem more memorable than the ones
I’ve created for my significant — or many times potentially significant — other.”
           He
then tells the tale of starting a mix tape when he started dating one of those
potential girlfriends but being dumped after only three songs. It started with
“Buon Giorno, Principessa” from the Life
is Beautiful soundtrack, then found its way to the Sex Pistols “Liar” and
American Music Club’s “Keep Me Around,” eventually leading to the depressing
stage of “How to Disappear Completely” by Radiohead, ending up — weeks after
having concluded his relations with the disaffected female — with the
reaffirming “I’ve Got My Mojo Working (And I Thought You’d Like to Know)” from
the Young Fresh Fellows.
But the RomanticMix is only one of endless variations
on the theme of using your favorite tunes speak for yourself.
www.artofthemix.org hosts “mixes of the week” and posts a ton of submitted play
lists, all loosely categorized in genres like The Platonic Mix or The Road Trip
Mix. One hundred play lists were posted on two recent days — March 2 and 3
— and carried titles like Gravity Rides
Everything, Steve’s ‘ 90s Rock,
and the seemingly obvious HATE, which
is listed in the category of Break Up tapes.
           Artofthemix
doesn’t mess around when it comes to analyzing the importance of the form: “The
politics of the mixed tape concern the politics of art, for the mixed tape
itself is an art, albeit a ‘lesser’ form of expression, ranking more with forms
such as the collage, the pastiche, the juxtaposition of found elements.
Nonetheless, if we are to grant it the status of art, what follows are a
politics, implications that are housed in two distinct spheres: economics and
empowerment.”
           All
this proves what us music dorks have known for a long time: Mix tapes pretty
much help with it all. The right mix gets people psyched up for working out,
they help build relationships, they make those long road trips all the more
tolerable, they bring back memories you had put into storage at the back of
your brain. With the right mix tape, you’re never at a loss for words.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2004.
