Ah, the mix tape. Part therapy, part love letter, part obsession... At left you see the center of my adolescence. My Technics SA-212 receiver (purchased dented and way cheap from Ollie Fretter's when I was 13) and my JVC KD-D50 cassette deck. I would harvest tunes from public radio--you see it there: WDET 101.9FM--and make mixes from my vinyl. That receiver is still kicking; I gave it to Jim Drummond for his office. The cassette deck is long since kaput, but you gotta dig those 1980s LCD meters, don't 'cha? A crude spectrum analyzer along with R/L and MONO VU meters. It also had a cool timer that was great for making nice mix tapes--you could program the length of tape at a counter would indicate how much space was left. Perfect when you had the entire floor spread with album jackets and a scratch pad full of tracks and times. Ah.... the mix tape.
Years ago, I laughed out loud when I read the following passage from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which is just a super fantastic read if you are a music snob/freak/junkie.
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules.
For a while I have wanted to pick up a copy of Thurson Moore's book on the mix tape. Here's a quote from the Wiki page on the book.
The mix tape is a form of American folk art: predigested cultural artifacts combined with homespun technology and magic marker turn the mix tape into a message in a bottle. I am no mere consumer of pop culture, it says, but also a producer of it. Mix tapes mark the moment of consumer culture in which listeners attained control over what they heard, in what order and at what cost.
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1 comment:
Its funny, I have a JVC kd-d50 dual cassette deck....and was thinking of all the mixed tapes I made on it....
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