The Meaning of the Mix

I can't remember exactly when I started making mix tapes. I'm pretty sure I started by simply taping songs off of the radio. I actually recently came across a bunch of these old tapes, while staying at the house I grew up in. You know, the old Certron tapes (actual tape pictured above). Apparently I would just sit around and tape the radio, I suppose for my new favorite hit song. I decided to give the tapes a listen, which ended up being hilarious. Aww, the passage of time.

Later in life, I remember getting into making mix tapes for people. You know the careful selection of songs that people craft, attempting to have the perfect transitions, but also communicating the right type of emotion. Of course, I still do this with Cd's now, but I was just thinking today about the nature of the mix tape. I have boxes upon boxes of mix tapes and Cd's that people have made. I have trouble throwing these away, as they seem to hold some key to the past.

It made me remember this one time when I was 18 years old and I made a mix tape for the guy I was dating at the time. See, our relationship had started to fall apart and my solution to this problem was to make what I called "a break-up mix". My insane idea was that I could craft this mix communicating what I wanted to say and it would make the whole break-up process easier. I remember sitting on the floor of my best friend's apartment picking out various Tiger Trap and Heavenly songs that would let him know how just how unhappy I was. Now, I know this is not the most effective tactic to communicate to another person, but I did mention I was 18. At the age of 18, we don't always make the best decisions. This was also the year I decided that I'd rather go into the social sciences, as opposed to the future as a medical doctor I had been planning.

How did this mix turn out? After I handed it over to the aforementioned boyfriend, he told me a few days later that he loved the mix- that it was the best one he had ever received.

So, yes, we dated for another year.

It reminded me of 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, and I wanted it to be a good one, because...to be honest, because I hadn't met anyone as promising as Laura since I'd started the DJ-ing, and meeting promising women was partly what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about. 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." -Nick Hornby