Mix tape, side A

Recently I came across this blog, and in scrolling through older posts I saw one where the writer told the tale of a mix tape he made for his (now) wife that he made back when they were first dating (13 years ago). And by "mix tape" he meant not a euphemism for a mix disc or a playlist; he menat recording songs on an audio cassette. He meant having to spend hours figuring out which songs to include, having to re-record if he changed his mind about the sequencing, having to adjust the levels on the tape deck so the tracks were at a relatively uniform volume during playback, having to figure out how much room was left on the tape as it got down toward the end of the side. He meant writing out the song names on the insert card by hand.

Old school.

He mentioned this in regard to replicating the mix on a playlist for his wife's iPod for their anniversary. The task proved to be very easy for him, as he already had all but one of the songs on his iPod, and the one missing he simply downloaded through iTunes. (He need not go out and buy the whole album.) There was no manually adjusting the sound levels; the software took care of that automatically (although not necessarily as well). There was no pulling out records or CDs and cueing them up to the right track and pressing record on the tape deck. Arranging the tracks was simply dragging and dropping them on the computer screen. It took far less time than making the original tape.

It wasn't the same.

I have more or less lamented the same thing. As I noted in this previous post, I used to make mix tapes for people with great regularity when I was in my 20's. Not just for prospective girlfriends but for friends. And they were always a fair amount of thought and effort (not that they always turned out to be great, but...). Now technology makes it infinitely easier, but that seems to work against the inclination to do it. The writer on that blog noted the legal implications of giving copyrighted material to another that could make doing it "legally" an expensive proposition. (A cassette was not a format that allowed for easily transferring to other media, other than to another cassette. It was no less illegal, I suppose, but it didn't seem as bad.) And while I concede that point, I think it misses a key issue that changed the scenario.

MP3 players.

Sure, the Walkman allowed for listening to cassettes and then later to CDs, but carrying around any significant amount of music involved lugging around much more than just the player and headphones. The advent and popularity of the iPod and other such devices made having one's music—and a lot of one's music, not just one CD or tape's worth—available in one's pocket. Not only did that make the sight of white earbuds more ubiquitous, it also made it less important for people to listen to what someone else made for them.

For example: If you have a cassette player (be it portable or in a car or elsewhere), you are going to be more inclined to pop in a mix tape made by someone else and listen to it all the way through. Why? Because tapes aren't as easy to skip around. Yes, one can hit the fast-forward button, but it's often easier to just listen to the song you might skip if you could just press one button and go past. So you listen from one end to another. And maybe you never listen to the tape again, but at least you listened to it, in the order that the person who made it intended for you to hear it. Maybe you picked up on what theme they sought to achieve (and there's always a theme), but you listened.

Now, one could argue (and with merit) that the CD really changed the game; CD players had the random-access capability (jumping to any track without having to fast-forward or rewind), and could even play the songs on a disc in random order. However, we aren't talking about making a mix CD here; the technology of CD burning devices in computers was not common until around the time iPods gained popularity (not that they weren't around first—they were—but they were specialty items in computers until the early part of the first decade of the 21st century, when iPods came on the scene). Really—how many mix CDs did you get in the period after you stopped getting mix tapes and before you got an MP3 player?

It's not that one can't give songs (perhaps on a flash drive) to another, or even hook up another's iPod and fill it with specific songs in a playlist, but those songs are likely just some of hundreds of others the person has on the device.

The songs you carefully crafted in a particular order do not have focus; likely they aren't the only thing the person has to listen to for that period of time.

Of course, there is a significant flaw in my theory. It's not that mp3 players didn't change the way music was listened to; they most certainly did. It's that those good ol' days probably weren't that good.

~

When it came to those mix tapes, the reality was more likely that the recipient may or may not have listened to the tape all the way through even once, and if so, it may have been more out of politeness than due to finding the content to be compelling. Ultimately, the songs on the tape are ones that the maker of the tape likes (presumably ones liked very much), and ones that the listener may not be familiar with at all.

Something I've figured out over the years: There's only so much that the average person can handle when it comes to hearing songs one hasn't heard before. That's why a majority of what the radio plays consists of songs that are already popular, with new songs mixed in (and then played to death so they can become as familiar as the already-established ones); the typical listener needs the sorbet of known songs to cleanse the palette between courses of new songs.

Thus, a mix tape that is filled with songs that represent the maker is offered in the hopes of finding an atypical listener. It's fishing with highly specific bait; most of the time it's going to fail miserably, but if it succeeds, then a truly special fish has been caught*.

When it came to finding a mate, if one was "serious" about music, a mix tape was a remarkably effective litmus test for gauging compatibility. Not only did it say something if the recipient liked the songs (assuming that he or she was not already familiar with them), but the fact that he or she bothered to listen at all and was open to liking some of it proved auspicious. Anyone who listened intently was definitely interested in you. The tape was not merely a collection of tracks; it was insight into who you were.

And let us not forget the all-important tape cover. That very much was part of the package. The effort put into that could be almost as much as assembling the tape itself. The way the songs were listed (did they go down in columns or run across?), if there was a picture cut from a magazine and pasted onto the flap (and whether that picture held a meaning suggestive or ironic); all these elements contributed to the whole experience and offered even more insight into the maker of the tape. In fact, that may be the key difference between a mix tape and a playlist; on an iPod, it is just a bunch of songs, whether they're listened to exclusively and in order.

It's not the same at all with an iPod. Not that I don't enjoy having all that music available in my pocket, but it's not the same. Or at least, it's not the same as how I fancy it was.

~

To be continued (sort of)...