They used to say ‘home taping is killing music’. Just how wrong can you be?
When pretty much any music you feel like listening to can be downloaded or streamed at the touch of a button, usually for free, we can now see that the act of taping LPs to cassettes was helping keep music alive.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, how many friendships and relationships were cemented by the glorious gift of the mix tape? It was the ultimate expression of love or friendship. It said, “Here is my taste in music. This is me opening myself up to you, at the same time as making myself look as cool as I possible can.” This probably meant you pretended you couldn’t hear the plaintive lure of your well-worn Tears For Fears LP, while sneakily borrowing your mate’s Fall live bootleg, but needs must.
The mix tape wasn’t just a sharing of music; it was an act of devotion, and also of creativity. The sequencing had to be just right, and a good mix tape would be rerecorded to and listened back over several times before it was deemed worthy enough for its recipient. It made every teenage music fan a suburban bedroom Phil Spector or George Martin.
And whole books have been devoted to mix tape cover art – your best handwriting, the choice of biro or fibre tip, the careful illumination of borders and curlicues – spotty, Morrissey-obsessed lovers channelled medieval monks, illustrating new bibles.
For a brief few years, it looked like information technology might save the idea of the mix tape – if not its original form.
I began transferring my CDs onto my laptop around 2002. At first I had to be choosy about what I ripped, always mindful of memory limits. But as those limits increased exponentially with each laptop upgrade, I soon built a library of 10,000 songs on my work station. Procrastinating between writing projects, I realised that not only could I create a playlist and then burn it onto a CD; I could create and manipulate artwork from the album covers, my photo collection, an infinity of fonts – in fact any imagery or artwork I wanted.
Sequencing the tracks became easier, but also better. You could quickly play back the transition from one song to another, seeing if it worked or not, then flip the order around and try it again without having to sit through the whole song. If you wanted, you could even introduce cross-fades and a bit of mixing.
The last mix CD I ever made in this way was for a younger relative, then in her early twenties. She’d only ever known music as pick-and-mix, its entire canon sitting there to be chosen, played, shuffled and randomised.
One night she came to our house in a flush of excitement. “Oh my God, you guys, I’ve just discovered this amazing band? I think you guys would absolutely love them? They’re from the seventies or something and they’re called The Clash? They’re really great, you should listen to them.”
My wife and I were delighted this young cousin had discovered such a band. So happy, in fact, that we made a mix CD of other stuff we thought she’d like, a bit like Amazon’s ‘If you bought that, we recommend this,’ only with humanity instead of algorithms.
When we gave her the mix CD, complete with designed sleeve bearing her name, she squealed with excitement and then turned to the carefully sequenced track listing. “Got… got… not got… never heard of… got…”
She slid in the CD, selected all the tracks that interested her, and listened to about five seconds of each. With practised efficiency, she reduced an hour-long CD to half a dozen tracks she liked the sound of but hadn’t heard before, and ripped those tracks into her perma-shuffled playlist.
I occasionally see Facebook posts from friends who, clearing the attic or cellar, find a box of tapes which they no longer have any means of playing. Me, I never put them away. Every time I sort through my study shelves, I whittle down the number of cassettes I want to keep, and now have it down to a few compilations I made at university and some New Order live bootlegs. I don’t have any means of playing them either – my last ghetto blaster chewed its final tape about six years ago. But I can’t get rid of them, not yet.
I have moved on though. My iTunes library now stands just shy of 23,000 songs. The best ones sit in the column down the left hand side of my screen in carefully constructed playlists, each one meticulously sequenced, occasionally fussed over or added to. It’s just a shame I can’t decorate the titles of those playlists with my favourite fibre-tip, then blow it dry so the plastic doesn’t smudge the ink.
Pete Brown
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