an ode to mixtapes

I drove back from Madison carrying the last reminders of my undergraduate years – my bed, my dresser, a desk and a few other things I had left behind for the summer. To move all this stuff required taking my parent's red minivan, which is big, cumbersome, and uses way too much gas. But the one plus side to driving the van was being able to use the tape deck, a technology that I don’t encounter very much anymore.

I got my first car this summer, a 1990 black Honda Accord with a cd player already installed. It seems to be one of the first in the era of car stereos, and the speakers don’t handle bass very well. But it suits me fine, especially since I can’t afford to fix anything that doesn’t affect the way the car runs.

So on the drive to Madison, I decided that this was the time to mixtape it. I grabbed a bunch from my collection – mostly newer ones, including a couple that I’ve only listened to once or twice because of the lack of tape players around. I also grabbed one entitled “my so-called tape.” The title itself is a throwback to high school, and when I put it in I was treated to a collection of songs and bands I really liked about 5 years ago – Green Day, Garbage, Elastica, Abba, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beastie Boys, Fiona Apple, and even, embarrassingly, the Backstreet Boys (which was the only song I skipped throughout the tape). Some of the songs I probably hadn’t heard since high school, but I still remembered most of the words. And this is what mixtapes are great for – little, plastic, audio time capsules.

A good mix tape should take you back in time – not necessarily to the time that the songs on it are from, but to the time when it was made. Every mixtape has a context and a history, although we probably don’t realize it when we press record. Whether it’s a tape you made for someone you had a crush on, or one that is a mix of top 40 hits collected from the radio, there is crucial information hiding in the plastic encasement.

Although I probably won’t be making many mix tapes soon (the lack of tape decks in cars, and the deconstruction of my parent’s stereo system, which was my tape-making mecca), in the past few years I have become more intent on making tapes with indie cred (which is bullshit, anyway), good transitions, and of course, not featuring the same band twice (well, MAYBE twice if the band had just TOO MANY good songs to choose from). There was a time, pre-portable cd player, when I made mix tapes with reckless abandon, breaking all of the unsaid rules about mixtapes. Considering I probably owned about 20 cds at the time, I chose almost EVERY good song from a cd I liked. I paid no attention whatsoever to transitions or themes. I made a whole series of these tapes and named them “best mix ever! Vol. I-VII”. I have since taped over many of these relics, and probably also sold many of the cds used to make them. And this makes me sad, because there was so much in those tapes that I will never get back.

A few summers ago my sister and I drove out to Colorado for her friend’s wedding. Her car had a tape deck, but it was finicky about those adaptor tapes and spat them right out. So we pulled together a collection mix tapes to entertain ourselves during the 16-hour drive, each way. I remember being somewhere in Nebraska screaming our heads off to Third Eye Blind and a bunch of other mid-90s hits. It was awesome. My new brother-in-law had a car stereo installed in her car as a surprise wedding gift, and it made me wonder how well he actually knows her – Erin isn’t the type to want a cd player! She likes her tapes!

I like my tapes too. I like my fun tapes, my dorky tapes, my trying-too-hard-to-be-indie tapes, my “I used to listen to this crap?!?” tapes. I like tapes other people made too, but they don’t allow me to get in their head. I can hypothesize and dream but I can never know. What I do know: don’t throw out your mix tapes, and don’t tape them over because you’re too poor to buy new blank tapes. Always make sure to have a tape player available somewhere.

originally written august 2004