Hands up if you've ever made or received a mixtape. Keep your hand up if it was for or from someone you fancied. Keep it up if it worked.
If you've still got your hand up (figuratively, at least) then I guarantee that you'll be able to name at least one song from that mixtape, if not the entire tracklisting.
If you don't know what a mixtape is then you're obviously too young for this blog — please put this blog down and return to squeezing Spotify on your Facebook.
Say it with music
The mixtape is a greatly under-rated 20th century ice-breaker and courtship ritual. I say 20th century as, like the pager, it is soon to become another relic of the digital age. The Oxford English Dictionary has already removed 'cassette player' from the concise version (not 'cassette tape' as widely publicised). Also, if you have kids, consider whether they will ever know the connection between a tape and a pencil.
Essayist Geoffrey O'Brien has called the personal mixtape 'the most widely practiced American art form'. Putting aside whether you think flinging a few songs together onto a TDK canvas is art or not, it's certainly true that, at its best, it's a creative process which produces a unique and lasting 'thing'. It's also true that mixtapes were hugely popular in their heyday — thankfully the barriers to entry are reassuringly low, almost American. Art or not, there are certainly good mixtapes and bad mixtapes, and Nick Hornby makes a decent stab at defining the rules in High Fidelity:
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.'
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
Whichever rules you play by, songs are lovingly chosen to show how sensitive, cool and attractive — and with hindsight, slightly obsessive — the DJ / conductor of love is. The tracks written out carefully (in pencil to avoid typos), with artist info too and a title: 'For Nicky'. Everything written but the obvious - 'please go out with me'. Borrowing words from your more confident heros: Mick Jagger (Let's spend the night together), Bob Dylan (Lay Lady Lay) and Alex Turner (I bet you look good on the dancefloor) to help sustain the narrative.
Not all mixtapes are serenades but I suspect a large proportion are more motivated by romance than altruism. Many, many years ago, a young man's essential courting pack included a lute and a hand-inked poem on flowered paper — I speak from bitter, bitter experience. Not so many years ago, the amateur DJ replaced the amateur minstrel and the lovemixtape succeeded the love sonnet.
Shuffle me not
Lovemixtapes are hand-crafted, made to order. Song choice and order is agonised over, transitions between tracks are tested before signing off and the mind struggles with the intended and unintended meanings of particular songs. This is one playlist that cannot be set to shuffle; some things are best not left to chance. Shuffle me, shuffle me not, shuffle me...
When heartbreak ridge finally does appear in the relationship horizon, at least there's always a memory crystallised, a sonic record of the love and the loss. Successful or not, every man remembers every mixtape he ever made for a girl. Standout individual tracks might be shared and re-used across different tapes but each mixtape is resolutely unique. A corner of your heart that's forever hers.
A friend of mine has the slightly disturbing habit of making heartbreak mixtapes. He says the only mixtapes he's made for girls have been created after they split up. All the little songs that define their relationship are tagged, bagged and compiled into a pseudo-chronological record. I don't know if he ever actually gives them out or not...that would be a little strange, like reading a musical review of your relationship in a magazine.
Sex, tapes and rock 'n' roll
It would be interesting to hear the other side of the tape: from those who receive rather than create mixtapes. Without edging into sexual politics, the act of making a mixtape is normally attributed to the more anally-retentive male, with the fortunate female recipient consigned, in a 50s style, to listen and not speak back. It would be wonderful to hear that this was misleading and actually there were just as many female mixtapers out there.
Or maybe there exists a perfect couple whose courtship was carried out to the tune of a handmade TDK soundtrack passed back and forth via successive mixtapes. Answers on a postcard please, or at least in comments at the bottom of this post — bonus points for the comment that admits to the most unromantic song in a mixtape, composed or received.
From mixtapes to mood music, from the boom-boom cattle markets of our teenage and twenty-something years to the 'back to mine' moments that demand the seduction playlist, it's a wonder that anyone managed to come together without music in the old days...perhaps Larkin wasn't wholly kidding:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin
Larkin was more into his Jazz anyway, claiming 'Few things in life have given me more pleasure in life than listening to jazz', but his personal 'Year of Wonder' successfully links the 3 R's (rock, roll and reproduction) to the emergence of the contraceptive pill and the relaxation of British attitudes to sexual expression. Great music can stimulate great conversation; sometimes great mixtapes can even stimulate great non-conversations...
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Picture Credits:
'Mixtape Series' by Natalie Kosnar (via lostateminor)
'Mix Tape Poster' by Kate Bingaman Burt (via Eva Harvey)
'Greg's Mixtape' by aharuty.tumblr.com
Hours for hours in front of the the stereo composing with proud feelings, hoping she wants to listen to it with your system, having a dump cold booty before moving again to feed the hungry stomack. The most unromantic I did: "The watcher and the tower" by but "Foreign affair" rescued him and myself. Thanks for the memories.