Mixtapes

There’s something intimately magical about putting together a collection of songs for someone special to us. Yet its effectiveness as an expression of our innermost feelings is now so (deeply) understated, that I'm led to believe it may be on its way to become a lost art.

I love music. I've always loved music. I have a clear recollection of my 5-year-old self sitting in our living room, entranced, listening to my mother’s LPs and 45s on a pretty terrible record player. But imperfect as the means might have been, they opened a door into a dreamland like no other. I would spend hours every day just listening to music. All kinds of music. And very early on I realised that music conveyed all sorts of emotions. That certain songs became synonyms for certain kinds of feelings. You could say it felt spiritual, for it touched me in a way that was profound, intangible and hard to put into words.

I also vividly remember having an urge to share the music I discovered. To take others in that same metaphysical journey I experienced first-hand. And I wondered if they would feel the same. If music would speak to them the way it did to me. And I've come to understand it mostly did. That whilst music touched different people in a slightly different way, there was something universal about it. A language of sounds with a range of emotions mirroring its dynamics, a lexicon of infinite possibilities; arguably, the perfect means of human expression.

But not everyone is a musician, I hear you say. Well, indeed. Not that it requires being gifted in any special way - I'm pretty sure it doesn't. But only a few of us actually take the time to perfect the art of connecting sounds in a (musically) meaningful way. Sadly it’s given nowhere near the same degree of importance (if any) of other subject matters in our school years. Yet, thanks to recorded music (something we all take for granted, forgetting that for most of human existence - until the late 19th century, in fact - there was no such thing), taking other people’s songs in their final form and perfecting the art of piecing them together, becomes the closest we non-musicians will ever get to creating something of our own, musically speaking. That assembly process is our moment of creation.

The term mixtape denotes an old-fashioned analogue recording medium known as magnetic tape or, more commonly, a cassette. The simplicity it offered (for the time, at least) to record sound from a variety of sources in such a small and portable device, made it the most common way to share music during the 80s and until the mid 90s. And just like a musician would lay down his or her songs in a particular arrangement to obtain a cohesive whole known as an album, we would apply similar or even greater care to create collections of songs that expressed moods, feelings, desires or simply whatever defined us musically at the time (and there’s always a time in our lives when this is a very heartfelt form of identity).

I've lost count of how many tapes I've recorded, for friends, girlfriends, and even people I didn’t know (and never got to know). But the pleasure was always there, always the same - sharing the music, expressing yourself through metaphors of sound. It all began with the choice of opening song. The setting of a mood. A declaration of sorts. Grabbing the listener and giving out a hint of the great ride ahead. Finding a flow from that point onwards. Listening to the finished work and constantly trying to picture in your mind what the other person would feel when particular songs came up. I even took the time to develop a special kind of handwriting that I used in most cassette inlays. I still use variations of it to this day. Because details matter.

Cassettes had another curious property. The fact that they had two sides may appear inconsequential at first, but it led to all sorts of interesting dilemmas and outcomes. It happened to be pretty hard to perfectly fill up one side of a cassette, yet leaving such gaps was totally unacceptable to the perfectionist in us (well, in me at least). It required either adjusting the previously intended song order (not good) or a last moment ingenious solution that involved the addition of a new song (or part of a song) to fill up the remaining space, the latter providing grounds to further wield our creativity and perhaps even surprise the intended listener. I frequently took it as an opportunity to hint at a hypothetical future mixtape, as if saying: “Hey, here’s a little taste of something else that I love; you might enjoy it!”, the effect being even greater if you (intentionally) left it out of the song list - it invariably led to being asked about “that interesting bit at the end”. Curiosity is the greatest kind of feedback.

The evolution of recording media then brought us the Compact Disc (CD) and not much has changed, I’d say, in the way people thought about mixtapes. Of course mixtape already sounded like a misnomer by then, as CDs were a purely digital format and had nothing to do with magnetic tape whatsoever. But their improved sound quality and flexibility (thanks to ever-friendlier recording software) helped fuel the passion well into the late 90s and early 00s. But then something happened, which changed the music industry forever. And with it, the old notion of sharing (and giving) music became almost meaningless and has since dwindled into ever greater insignificance.

I’m talking, of course, about the diffusion of peer-to-peer networking and the unstoppable rise of (digital) piracy. Whilst noble in principle, for democratising access to music (and other kinds of cultural output) and exposing the irrelevance (and greed) of the middle-man, it had the unintended effect of ruining our special attachment to these art forms. By becoming immaterial and readily available at little or no cost, their inherent value lessened. It's too much for too little, and we can never dedicate enough of our attention in order to fully appreciate it. So we simply accumulate it in virtual piles of things to see or hear, which rarely get seen or heard.

Who still cares about a great opening song and whatever mood it sets, when people don't even listen to albums anymore? What does that concept even mean today, when the listening experience consists of endless streams of individual songs, determined by algorithms instead of a (much needed) human touch? Who felt a jolt of excitement during that moment in Boyhood when Ethan Hawke presents his then 15-year-old son with "The Beatles' Black Album", a mixtape of his personal selections from each Beatle’s solo career? How many of us even truly listen to music anymore?

Well, I do and always will. And collections like those I’ve made all my life will keep on being the most treasured way of introducing and expressing myself. But for all the dedication with which we plan every detail of the personal masterpieces we still affectionately call mixtapes, from the critical choice of opening and closing songs, to the mood and flow of the inner sequence, and even all the way to the lettering of the inlay, it should be first and foremost a labour of love. And all you need is to love music to be articulate in its beautiful language.