Eulogy for my Mix Tape9

by Eric “Butter” Levy

When was the last time you sat down and made a mix tape, eh? Was it for someone special? Someone who caught your eye? Was it for yourself? For a friend? For that mile long walk home or that far away road trip? When was the last time you got a mix tape someone else made for you? Are you one of those who has no clue what a mix tape is, too young to remember the heyday of tape and its decline to the CD… only to be replaced once again by digital files?

[Jaie Suicide in Solitude]

Just like John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity… I miss mix tapes. I came to this realization a few hours ago, as I clicked and dragged and dropped songs into a playlist. It’s not the same. I was making a CD for a girl… selecting a couple of interesting songs she can listen to in her factory default, non mp3 compatible, car stereo. I chose happy songs. Traffic here is a bitch, specially for a country that’s literally 2 hours long, 6 hours wide.

Once I had selected the songs -about 30 of those- I had to trim the playlist further, because a regular CD only holds about 70 mins of music. Clickity Click Click, and half the list gets chopped down. Rearrange this one here, put that one over there… try to keep the overall emotional composition of the playlist as you poke and prod the files with your cursor, and slowly sit back, gaze at the screen once again… marveling at your masterpiece. Click on burn CD and go get a glass of water.

When I was younger, I used to make mix tapes for myself all the time. I had four CDs (Metallica’s …And Justice for All, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Iron Maiden’s Fear of the Dark and Brian Adams’ Waking up the Neighbors) and a few cassettes. I would sit on the living room, and add around the duration time of the songs I liked, to make sure they would fit on side A, and then on side B. 30 minutes on each side, so I had to be careful. Then I would play the song I wanted and hit record on the deck… and I would listen to the entire song as it got recorded on the tape.

Then I would repeat the process once again, this time by copying songs from a tape instead of a CD, and so on and so forth.

It was around that same time that puberty struck, and instead of making mix tapes for myself, I would make them for the girl I had my eye on. Of course, they were not into the same type of music I am… and most often than not I got stared at when I handed them this mix tapes with songs by ‘Tallica, AC/DC, Maiden, Nirvana, Guns ‘N Roses… and some Latin American bands like Las Victimas del Dr. Cerebro (Dr. Brain’s Victims for you my dear English speaking readers), all deftly recorded from the one and only rock station. These tapes would have the most bizarre artwork too! I would spend hours scouring scientific magazines, old comic books, and rock n roll mags for images and what not, and create quite elaborate collages as the covers for this mix tapes. Sometimes I would doodle on them too… all adding to that mystique, if you will, of being the weird kid who spends all his time drawing and listening to that SATANIC music.

Mix tapes are a form of urban art that has slowly been forgotten, and it is a shame. Tomorrow, my friend will get a cd with some doodles on it… and a hand made cover: a sketch by yours truly. If all goes according to plan, she might be able to sell that sketch on a Comic Con in a few years and make a buck out of it, no?

Playlists have a surgical sterility to them. They lack that human aspect, that emotional thread inherent in mix tapes. It really does not matter how much effort and care you put into constructing a playlist, it will never be as warm as a mix tape.

And this, my dear reader… is my eulogy for the mix tape. A now forgotten medium of popular and urban art that was consumed by progress and technology.

Godspeed!