Making mixtapes
For the revival of a lost art
There’s an art to it. First of all, it can’t all be bangers; you need palate cleansers and transitional tracks. Even the best DJs drop a tune to let people tie their shoelaces and fetch a drink. Roughly, three bangers, a slow one, a weird one, three more bangers, a stately one and a daft cute choice at the end. That should do you nine times out of ten.
I’ve written before about the charm of the analogue. That vanished world of phones with chord extensions, VCRs and photo development, the slow tactile technology of the 1980s. I don’t want to get too sentimental about this; the ability to stay in touch with each other constantly which exists nowadays has all kinds of positive impacts on people and in particular families. We’re all only ever now a few messages from resolving that long-running sibling dispute.
Yet analogue technology did have a tactility, a solidity, which the digital world in all its conveniences cannot match. This was squarely manifested in the mix tape or later mix CD, the compiling of a selection of music, drawn from all over your record collection, often for a lover but not rarely just for a friend. ‘I’m into this stuff!’, the mix tape said, a sentiment would be ably supported by your pressing an actual physical object into their hand.
Of course, tapes were too long back then; for a 90-minute affair you were talking about two sides of forty-five minutes each, far too much space to fill. How many good double albums are there after all?
When you copied songs from CD to tapes, you had to time the last track to fit in time before the spool ran out. Even for the proficient tapemaker, there were times when songs cut out, or cut out super abruptly; sometimes, you had to go and realign earlier songs so you had a clean run to a final song which finished before the spool ran out. Ideally, you’d have a few seconds of dead tape after the last track, so the listener could take in what you’d put together for them, before the final click of conclusion.
Then you had the physical artefact of the mix CD, which was a going concern until at least the late 2000s. This was an ideal format, as you had the physical object of the CD and also a vastly truncated running time. About ten or eleven tracks (even twelve seems somehow excessive to me) and you were golden with, crucially – and this is in part the pitfalls of the long cassette – no repeat artists. That is a fast rule for making compilations; no one artist should get more than one song.
It’s odd, isn’t it, that I still think of them as mixtapes – the way in the late 2000s we used to refer to the DVD store as the ‘video shop’, the term for the older technology maintaining itself in face of a change in format. It’s the same way we described something as a ‘great record’ which we went out and bought on CD. Surely few generations can have lived through as many changes in cultural formats than Geriatric Millennials; who else will weep for the MP3?
Two mix CDs particularly stick in my mind.
Firstly, one one of my ex-girlfriends made me, with a black tissue frame and there on a separate piece of paper in the middle the image of an umbrella floating down over a cityscape which she had drawn from the (willfully obtuse) novel I had been writing at the time. I remember the closing track was ‘The Dreaming Moon’ by The Magnetic Fields, there were tunes by Rufus Wainright and Jonathan Richman (‘My Little Kookenhaken’) and, my favourite on that mix, Coco Rosie’s ‘By Your Side’. ‘All I want with my life is to be your housewife, be your housewife…’ Oh and a Joanna Newsom one about the difference between the sprout and the bean.
Well, I listened to that an awful lot my first year in Berlin, I really loved it. I’m sure it’s around somewhere, shoved into some obscure box of old CDs in some place I used to live. What will remain of me in this world?
Then one I made in the depths of heartbreak, when I spectacularly destroyed my first love. Working for social services in Nottingham, on what was effectively the world’s most miserable gap year, I conceived the idea of sending a CD to my first love to, if not win her back, at least communicate the intense sorrow I was going through.
I can remember the first few tracks pretty clearly; first up Belle and Sebastian’s ‘I’m a Cuckoo’, then ‘Rip it Up’ by Orange Juice, and then, in one of the slightly leftfield choices I counsel for track three or four, ‘Getting to Know You’ from the musical The King and I.
My memory gets a little fuzzy after that, but I do remember that towards the end there was ‘Like a Prayer’ by Madonna, and that it finished with Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’, chosen in part because I was going to Berlin a few months later. Well, Vienna is German-speaking.