Mixtapes

Memorex. BASF. Maxell.

These were familiar brands to Gen X kids interested in music. They provided us with the tools of our trade—the blank cassette. Blank tapes were the iPod and iTunes of the 80s and early 90s.

If you wanted to copy an album so that you could listen to it anywhere else at all, you generally had to use a blank tape. It didn’t matter if it was an album (vinyl record), a CD, or another tape: if you wanted to make a copy of an album, the way to do it was to play the album and hit record on the tape deck.

Copying albums was useful if your friend had something you wanted to listen to, and you might have a portable tape player in your car and want to listen to something you had on vinyl. A $1 blank tape was a lot cheaper than buying the original tape at the record store for like $10.

Beyond expanding my album collection, there was another really good reason to own lots of blank cassettes: mixtapes. Blank tapes became the canvas for your creations, and you could create a tape just for yourself… or for another person.

You could trade and get an idea of an entirely different genre of music, ultimately expanding your musical tastes. Or, you could put all of your favorite songs on one tape so you could just wear them out over time.

There was quite an art to it, but you could also expand your collection for free if you could record a song directly from the radio. The challenge was catching the song without an intro or outro interrupting the music, like a DJ talking or a commercial fading in. To accomplish this, you’d want to use a second cassette for over-the-air broadcasts, then clip that version onto the mixtape.

This was a lot like recording a TV show on VHS so you could watch it later, but it also meant that the more you copied it, the lower the quality got—so you had to be careful. Even worse, cassettes are fragile and prone to erosion just from being played repeatedly.

All of these reasons were enough to need to own blank tapes, but there was one more reason I felt compelled to always keep them around.

Creating a mixtape I wanted to listen to over and over again meant that I needed to start with the right song, and then follow it up with another song that made sense. If it was a punk mixtape, it needed to set the upper bound for the tape and start out fast and intense, but it also couldn’t be the most intense song on the whole album. Similarly, it was much better to do a slower song after a faster one than 2 slow songs in a row, and certain songs seemed to flow better together than others.

No matter what the genre of the mixtape was, that first song absolutely had to draw you in, to make you want to hear the next song. The mood was set, so it was really important to choose a good lead.

I grew up in an era where you listened to a full album from start to finish, in a particular order, pretty much every time. There was no “random” button on any of my tape players, so besides making mixtapes meant considering that order with every song.

Today, we don’t play with mixtapes very much in the world, but there is something of a digital version: the playlist. I do enjoy fiddling with playlists on Pandora, and if you can access Pandora and want to see some of those, let me know in the comments and I’ll link to some of them. You can also share your digital playlist if you want, and people can check them out too!

Mixtapes were social currency back in the day, a kind of way to express yourself long before social media became the de facto home base for identity. I look back on trading them with nostalgia, but also with gratitude that I can access just about any song I want instantly today.

They were tedious and time consuming to make, but creating a mixtape gave you a pretty real sense of satisfaction, too. Did you ever make mixtapes when you were growing up, and if you grew up after tapes were gone, do you make playlists today?