The Lost Dark Art of the Mix Tape

(… a bit of silence.  You have to let the tape roll for a few seconds, or else the intro gets cut off … there.)

There was a time that it was possible to say everything you needed to say with a small rectangular bit of plastic containing a thin strip of magnetic tape.  It was 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes of glory. It was the music of the spheres — mostly social ones. It was the mix tape, an artifact of a bygone age, perhaps. But also a lost art form, a dark art of play/record, pause, and fade.

In this world of playlists and iPod shuffles, the ancient art form of the mix-tape is a fading memory of a world soaked in sepia toned nostalgia.  Or maybe not sepia tone, so much as pastel colours, and brass trimmings.  Yet, a few of us remember the clack of a C-90 tape, the BASF, the Maxell, the Memorex, in our hands. Making mix tapes was the act of stringing together poetry, compiling the lists, the employment of quick thinking about sequencing, about fades, about themes, about sheer and unadulterated expression.

Because that’s what the making of the mix tape was — expression.

It might have been the expression of  what we absolutely knew to be superior musical taste, with the crowd pleasers mixed in with the more obscure tracks, the ones that not only exalted the listener, but also of the mix-tape creator, the alchemist, the magician, who so nonchalantly placed it in the running. And still hoping you’d be impressed, we hoped, we willed, that the sheer cool of the song would become attached to the way others viewed us.  Or maybe it was an act of young, and unpolluted (and sometimes unrequited) love, with each song being a sentiment straight from one heart and into the center of another.

Start the tape.

Let the transparent lead-in roll, and wait for the black.  Then, clamp those play/record buttons down, savagely. And it is begun. There you’d sit surrounded by album covers, watching that black hole sun spin, while queuing up the next one, holding the black vinyl disc by the edges in anticipation.

Mix tapes were acts of creation.

You were an artist, with the piles of albums feverishly plucked from the racks in turn, and then strewn on the floor when their time in the sun was over.  They are paint to a canvas.  This was not the time for order in the outside world, only order of the inside world. Only with the architecture of sounds, tied by theme or by sonic unity.  And there were no rules — other than the one about no two tracks being by one artist on one side of the tape.

The pens and pencils ran furiously over the laminated inserts as the music played, cramming the titles of songs together, running into the names of bands like cars lined up crookedly in a musical traffic jam.  The breaths were inhaled, and then held, as we begged our stereos not to cut off that last song on side-A, because that song was such a perfect ending to a side, such a perfect set up to side-B. You eyed the rolling tape, watching the thin black band get thinner, and thinner.

“Oh please!” you muttered to yourself, “Just fit.”

Sometimes it did.  Sometimes it didn’t. There were only so many songs that could fit on one side of your mix tape.  Even if it didn’t, there was always side-B to make up for it. You could redeem yourself with side B — if you chose carefully, if you were wise. And that’s the thing.  The limitations of the exercise is what made it fun. When that perfect song did fit, when it did dovetail so perfectly with the next track, it was transcendent, almost as good as the love we hoped our tape would inspire when we gave it to that special someone.

And that’s bottom line. Mix tapes, like love itself, were always best when you gave them away.

When you’re done, you’ve got an artifact. You have a collection of little slices of time as captured by means of plastic, magnetic tape, and traces of ritual, lingering like some ineffably sweet scent.  You’ve created something out of nothing, fashioning from the ether of the Top Forty, or from imported treasures that none of your friends knew existed.  You’ve done more than create a playlist. You’ve given birth to something, an object no less, that didn’t exist in that same way before. Mix tapes were always unique.

Later, they’d be listened to, for a while.  Maybe they helped to break down the walls of reticence in a lover. Or maybe they, and you, were spurned.  Perhaps they ended up a a shoe box, forever separated from their handmade track listings, the labels faded or smudged by over-eager and sweaty hands. Maybe they ended up in a pile, given back to you by someone who couldn’t see the value in them, or perhaps in anything.

But whether held with admiration, love, or scorn, they are artifacts of our lives. They are the wonderful, and sharply in-focus present and all of the emotions felt in the present, suspended in amber, and held on the hiss and crackle of replicated analogue waves, pulling sounds down from the ages, and telling the listener all they ever needed to know about us in that specific moment.

Mix tapes were no less than our bids for immortality.

Photo Credit

“An elegant weapon…for a more civilized time” wblo @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

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