The Mixtape Dilemma, Revisited

The mixtape as it exists today, and indeed probably when they were first in vogue, is a cultural curiosity. They exist for any number of reasons — to heal, or wallow in, a broken heart; to get pumped up before some strenuous activity; the primary reason for their existence, though, is to win over the unfortunate object of your nerdy, unrequited love — or for no reason at all.

The act of making a mixtape was a painstaking process, particularly before the advent of the CD player. It involved sitting by your radio for hours on end, waiting for that song that you know is exactly what your tape demands, only to miss the first 20 seconds of the song because you lost focus and had to rush to hit the record button.

Sometimes it even involved pestering the radio station with call after call to request that one song which will perfectly express how you feel. But it didn’t matter how long, or how many calls it took, you were going to sit there until you got that mixtape perfect.

And then, only once you were done recording both sides perfectly, you would spend hours making the perfect cover art or case insert to accompany the tape; giving it that special something to make it even better.

These days, the art of the mixtape seems lost. Adrift in a sea of smart playlists, audioscrobbles, and genius mixes. The art of song selection is no longer an act of persistence and determination, but simply a matter of sifting through the 50,000 tracks you have in your iTunes library to fill a CD, or compose a playlist.

But even setting aside the art of the mixtape, is a mix CD or a playlist even remotely as personal, as visceral, as important as an actual cassette tape painstakingly recorded by hand? No, it’s not.

The mix CD seems like the natural progression from the mixtape right? But it’s not. It’s the poor cousin of the mixtape. The mix CD lacks the panache, the personal touch of the mixtape. Choose your playlist (you are burning a playlist, right?), put the blank CD-R in the drive and click burn, then 5 minutes later out pops your CD ready to give to that someone special. Maybe spend a little bit of time in Photoshop creating cover, and if you are feeling extra adventurous maybe a label, and you are done.

The playlist is an even poorer cousin. Literally the only effort that goes into creating a playlist is the song selection. Good luck winning your crush over with that — all you’ve done is prove to him/her they’re worth approximately 5 minutes of your time

And now, we have the online mixtape. The online mixtape is as far as I am concerned, the new natural progression from the mixtape, if only for one reason — it’s just as easy to get wrong, and just as hard to get right, and it all boils down to effort.

You can put some work into it: use a proper domain name, you know, one you’ve paid for; learn HTML & CSS1 and create a beautiful, personal design for the page; slip them a handwritten note with something cute or romantic on it along with the URL, the wait and watch your effort pay dividends1.

Or alternatively, you can take the easy way out: dump the mixtape into a plain, undecorated HTML page (or worse, a generic “free” template); upload it to some modern version of Geocities, littered with ads because you were too cheap to pay for even the cheapest of hosting; send your crush an impersonal email or SMS with nothing but the 157 character URL, then watch in horror as they spend two minutes on the page and never return.

Often, as technology is made obsolete, we lose some of the charms we hadn’t considered about our old stuff; but then, occasionally, something pops up that allows us to resurrect the spirit of what has been lost.

Or, you know, you could just buy a tapedeck, and record a proper mixtape, old timer.

Footnotes

  1. If, for some reason, you don’t already know it. I’m sure you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be making an online mixtape, for crying out loud. ↩
  2. Or not, because you really should know that a mixtape rarely actually works. ↩

This is a rewritten version of an old article, called, strangely enough, The Mixtape Dilemma. Feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email at dean@harris.tc and let me know if I’ve gotten better or worse at this.