In Praise Of The Mixtape

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For someone who writes about new technology, I’m a guy surrounded by a lot of old tech. I just bought a new turntable for my vinyl collection, I oil paint in my free time and my girlfriend plays a big black box of wood and ivory that takes up a lot of space in our study (yes, we call it that). Tell my girlfriend to play a compact electric piano instead and she’ll show you the door. There’s just no match for some technology, however ancient or impractical. But the mother of all magical technologies of the not-too-distant-past was the mixtape. Before you groan and write this off as a fetish of an aging hipster, remember this: I’m not that hip. Glad we sorted that out. Ask anyone who grew up in the ’80s or ’90s about the mixtape, and you’ll invariably see their eyes light up. Whether you were a Cure fan, into Black Flag, Kool Moe Dee or Goldie, the mixtape inspired you and it cemented friendships. It was the third buddy on road trips and it set the mood for awkward sexual encounters that would have been disastrous without the soothing sounds of the mixtape playing in the background. Making a mixtape was an investment in time, and giving someone one was like drawing them a picture. They carried a weight that CDs or iPod playlists just don’t have because making one wasn’t just a matter of dragging around tracks in iTunes and hitting “burn” -- you spent an entire day making someone a mixtape. And even though you were paid a crap wage at a sh*t job, you bought those good tapes because you cared about the music. Anything less was barbaric. As crappy as they look now, they are still less disposable than a USB key loaded with tracks. I’m about as far from a hoarder as you could be, but I have a shelf full of mixtapes and can’t bring myself to throw them out. I recently converted my HDV videos to DVD, but it would be blasphemy to do this to a mixtape. It just doesn’t translate. In the age of lossless digital copying, analog tape technology is stone age, but the thing that makes mixtapes terrible is also what makes them great. Like that Bones Brigade VHS tape that you loved into a fuzzy and warbling oblivion, a mixtape is a living document. It’s imperfect, needs care and ages in a way that’s essentially human. Adam Yauch may be gone, but he will live on for years in mixtapes that were too good to throw away, even after the last of the players is trashed. Apart from freezing your head, the mixtape is the closest technology will ever bring us to immortality. Continue Reading

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