Today I want to talk about that all-important hobby of yesteryear; the mix tape. Remember those? Anyone under the age of about 25 has no memory of this era, but for me and many of my peers, it was a coveted gift.
Youngsters who only know cds may think, "Now we make mix cds - what's the big deal? It's easier, faster, and doesn't unravel after the 5th rewind." To that I say, "It is a big deal! The process has been sterilized, stripped of all the painstaking nuances that made it such a gift in the first place."
At the age of around 11, I my favorite hobby was to spend countless hours in my bedroom, prostrate in front of my "boom box" with one index finger on "record" and the other on "pause", waiting for that crucial 2 seconds of blank space to seperate the songs. If I was recording straight from the radio it was even more sensitive work, requiring anticipating the very second the DJ would stop talking over the intro, and again when he would come on over the outro. This was an extremely delicate operation.
Once I had filled both sides of the tape, the work was still not done. Summoning my very best penmanship, it was time to write out the track list. Including the name of the song, artist, year, and running time; this process took forever. Scratch outs and white-out were definitely unacceptable, so a mis-spelling meant trashing the list and starting all over again. It could take hours to get the track list perfect.
In modern times giving the gift of music means only inserting a cd and clicking "burn". Print out the track list and it's done. You could make 30 of these in a day. So, I ask you, where is the gift in this? There is no more romance in the act, no more work involved.
Although the advancement of music technology has increased sound quality, it has robbed us of the magic of the mix tape. I continue to make mix cds for my friends, but it's less of a process, and therefore less of a gift.
Does anyone out there agree with me? Or not? Leave a comment!
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4 comments:
I feel your pang of loss. Although, I can remember that I had this friggin' gerry-rigged contraption that ran through just about electronic device that I owned so that I could get CDs and records to play. It was a heaven-sent stroke of genius when I figured out how to 'blend' songs so that one could fade-in over top of the previous one fading out. At last count my tapes stopped at number 40 or thereabouts. My cds are up to about 25 or so. And I've "found" some programs that let me track CDs (Nero is awesome for this), so I can do my fade-in-fade-out thing and layer tracks and what-not.
But I concur. There's nothign like the lost art of the mix tape. In fact, the last tapes I made I still listen to on the only tape player I own that still works - a walkman that I use for snowboarding so I don't have to wreck a cd-player or damage the hard-drive of my MP3 player.
I am just so glad that I'm not the only person who spent so much time making mix tapes by hand like that. Sure, John Cusack made them in High Fidelity, but he had expensive equipment. Even his headphones were audiophile. Just not the same.
And I remember how important penmanship was on that track listing. It couldn't just be correct: the writing style had to be "cool". (Or something. I mean, I was eleven.) To my thinking, it was a proud badge of nerdhood in a school of norms.
Still, there's something about a really well crafted playlist, even when you're just sending it to someone's mp3 player.
You're right, Forrest...there is still an important element in the perfect playlist. It's just that all the work now is crafting a well-organized tracklist that flows evenly and makes sense together as a mix. I still don't understand the nuances of the art of that process, but at least I have more time to focus on it now that I'm not hand-writing the track list!
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