[In the previous post I started ruminating on the mix tape. This post continues on that topic.]
Conceding that a playlist or mix CD is a contemporary equivalent to the mix tape, another aspect of the mix tape scenario that I think plays heavily into what makes one do it is being in one's teens or 20's, when one's passion about music tends to be the highest. It takes a certain level of delightful arrogance and non-jaded naiveté to want to turn others on to what one considers to be worthwhile tracks that these others probably would not discover on their own. It's essentially proselytizing but about music rather than about salvation (although when one is inclined to make these compilations, one probably considers the music to be salvation).
I find that as I progressed through my 30's and now into the onset of my 40's, I still have an active interest in music. I have an emusic subscription and download 100 songs a month. I still check out upcoming bands in what I download. However, I don't have the energy or inclination to try to get my friends to hear it like I did a couple decades ago.
And these days, if I wanted to turn someone on to a band, I wouldn't have to put their song on a CD along with a bunch of others; I'd simply send them a link to the band's MySpace page or some other place where they could stream the track.
Which is not at all the same.
That brings up another key difference. Not only has the medium for distribution changed from what was prevalent even ten years ago, but so has the opportunities bands have to get attention. Every one can have a website of some sort with relatively little cost. Thus it is not as much a matter of the make of the tape being one who seeks out the obscure to highlight it to the less-inclined-but-potentially-interested as it is getting the others to pay attention to these highlighted tracks apart from all the other distractions on the web.
(I should clarify that I am taking as a bit of a thesis the notion that mix tapes were more likely to be made by those whose musical tastes ran outside the mainstream, to a greater or lesser extent. It's way too convenient to declare that the "mainstream" has changed, but I do think there is a great deal of truth to the declaration, even without offering specific evidence. The world has changed, but it always has been changing and will continue to change; that much should not be a revelation to anyone, of any age.)
There was a time when underground artists were only written about in photocopied fanzines, and only played on small college radio stations. That is no longer the case. The web makes it all so much easier for bands to be heard and be written about now.
That's not a bad thing. It may not always be good, but it's not bad. To glorify the greater efforts of the past is to wallow in nostalgia and sublimate envy of how good the kids coming up these days have it.
I digress.
~
The other key element to a successful mix tape, as I noted yesterday, is finding a willing recipient. And by that I mean someone who is actively looking to be turned on to new bands.
I was such a person back when I was about 18 or 19.
A guy I worked with and occasionally hung out with was one who made a photocopied fanzine (such as I alluded to above) and who turned me on to a lot of the punk and post-punk and pre-alternative scene of the mid to late '80s. (Granted, this was back when Squeeze and XTC were way out of the mainstream. Not that they necessarily got to be household names, but their sound would be far more mainstream nowadays. The Police, too, were still cool back then. Granted, they seemed to have re-gained much of their punk cred now that enough time has passed, but they went through a period of being too big for that scene. As silly as it is to blame a band for becoming popular, yes. I digress.)
I soaked up the tapes he made for me. I became a big fan of many bands he turned me on to (most notably the Dickies, clown princes of the LA punk scene back in the '80s). The synchronicity of what he was putting out and what I was taking in truly was magical.
It didn't last, of course. He quit, and we lost touch. But it was okay, because I had blossomed into one who could find music on my own.
I never found anyone to be my apprentice when I was gung-ho on making tapes. People liked the tapes, certainly, but no one ever reacted the way I had when I was on the other side.
But someday I may have kids...
~
I must admit at this point that by the time my fiancée and I met the era of the mix tape was already over. I did give her a couple compilation CDs that I had already prepared (and which I had, with delightful arrogance, made copies of and given to a bunch of others), and although I did make some CDs specially for her after we were dating and she made one for me, but I don't recall making a mix for her as an initial salvo to try to win her heart.
However, musical compatibility was a very important element of me noticing her. In fact, it was a conversation we had where she alluded to having been a DJ at her college radio station and playing Frank Zappa when the frat boys would call up and want to hear Chumba Wumba's "Tub Thumping".
It wasn't that I was a huge Zappa fan; it was just that she knew who he was (outside of "Valley Girl") and how that likely indicated that she held similarly eclectic (a term which has lost all meaning now, yes) tastes in music, which was definitely something important to me.
And clearly something about that translated, because it's over five years and one engagement later. I'm not saying that was the only compatibility we shared, but it was the first one I could discern in a simple conversation. That was what transformed her from a girl to whom I was talking into a girl in whom I was interested.
Had I been still in my 20's, a mix tape (or, I suppose nowadays, a mix CD) undoubtedly would have been in order.
But clearly that's not always necessary.
143.
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