"I'm gonna make you a mixtape..."

One the most utilized but unappreciated media of mass art in the past 30 years is the mixtape. Producing mixtapes is not difficult and can be fairly quick and simple. By the early nineties, most people could get their hands on some form of cassette tape recording device even if it was their car stereo. When CDs and PCs became widely available, things got even easier. Once the proper materials are obtained, simply pick some of your favorite songs and copy to tape or CD.

(Just to clarify: Although mixtapes are "recorded...traditionally onto a compact audio cassette," the term survived the shift to CDs and members of my generation probably instinctively think 'burned CD containing various artists" when they hear the word 'mixtape')

I am beginning to fear the mixtape will disappear during this transitional time in the music world. Genius and the iPod, Last FM, Pandora, MP3 players and all the other ways of finding and listening to music that are growing in popularity pose a serious threat to the mixtape. This is not evolution, it is "Mix"-icide.

Mixtapes have something to offer that the modern mediums do not. Wikipedia points out this passage from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity:

"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules."

There is something sacred about searching your music catalog and knowledge. It is sometimes agonizing to think which artists fit well next to each other and which have to be left out because you already have the twenty tracks you were looking for. You have to consider the diversity of your own music taste and the songs that will appeal to the recipient of your tape (Note: I think most, not all, mixtapes are made for someone else). Creating a mixtape is a ritual. A cult following exists, and it grasps the importance of its existence.

I can remember more than a few occasions in my life when developing friendships were solidified by the simple gesture of making mixtapes for each other. Exchanging mixtapes is like a right of passage among music lovers. By selecting songs you like and giving them to someone, you are saying three things: here is what I like, I think I know what you will like, and it is worth it to me to put in the effort to know you better.

I would not consider myself much of a technophobe, traditionalist, or even a nostalgic, but invention does not always mean progress. SAVE THE MIXTAPE, MAKE ONE FOR A FRIEND!