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Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture

Posted by Daniel Stout on 4 April 2005 at 10:48 PM | 2 Comments

This totally rocks. In a month, Thurston Moore’s Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture will be released. It sounds like an awesome book. Of course I enthuse because I love making mix tapes. I’ve been making mix tapes since high school. The weird thing is I haven’t given it up. I mean, really, if you were as crazy as I am about music, you would definitely be making mix tapes, now wouldn’t you? These days I make the mix CD instead of tapes, but it’s all the same more or less (though I totally agree with Moore’s comments about how CDs & MP3s sound). Here’s a snippet over at Wired from the book. By the way, you can listen to Mixtape Vol 2 over at SonicYouth.com.

2 Comments

Faust Gertz | April 5, 2005 3:17 PM | Permalink | Reply

Since my car doesn't have a CD player, I listen to old mixtapes while driving. There is a box full of them in my back seat. I've known (and still know) some excellent mixtapers and I really enjoy listening to the tapes.

Making a good mixtape took a lot more work than it takes to make a mix CD-R. Today, if you need a song, you simply download it. Back then, if you needed a song, you either went shopping, or, more likely, borrowed the LP from a friend. I even recall requesting songs on the radio so that I could tape them for future use. It could take weeks for folks scrounge the music necessary for a single mixtape. I recently listened a tape containing the Cleaning Ladies' 'She Won't French Kiss' that I am sure my friend got off of one of my mix video tapes. I love it when I hear a song I remember furnishing to or having procured from a friend. It brings back fond memories of a time when finding a song took more effort than hitting "submit" and sharing music meant physically going over to someone's house.

I could share more fond memories of days long past, but I won't bore you my tales of being an audiophile back when some people still thought Yakov Smirnoff and Dennis Miller were funny. I'm not nostalgic for tape hiss, just the mixes and the enthusiasm that went into them.

Thanks for the heads up. I look forward to the book.

BTW... Heartbeats + Happiness never collects dust at the Gertz house.

steve | April 8, 2005 1:54 PM | Permalink | Reply

It's nice to see the mix tape lives on. I'm not a Luddite when it comes to music, but I'm not ashamed to subscribe to mix tape nostalgia for the reasons Faust explained. Downloaded music is so de-contextualized. The songs that have a lasting hold on me--the ones that made the mix tape-usually have a deeply personal connection with the individuals that introduced me to them. For example, I can't think of Black 47 without conjuring up memories of a corner room in 3rd floor Larsen, or it's audiophilic inhabitant.