In the past several months, I’ve had a couple of buddies give me cds they’ve made, several of them “mix tapes.” (I’m really into the mix of The Coup, Common, and Michael Franti, btw). Anyway, I’m a mix tape fanatic, from doing tapes for our wedding reception to a series of mix cds for The Rouge Forum. And, I’ve logged a lot of time in the past year-and-a-half listening to several of the Another Late Night mix albums (particularly the cds editions compiled by Kid Loco and Tommy Guerrero).
So the new book (out next month), The Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, edited by Sonic Youth‘s Thurston Moore, is right up my alley.
Here’s an excerpt of the book from WiredSonic Youth’s Thurston Moore on the power of the mix tape
The first time I ever heard of someone making a mix tape was in 1978. Robert Christgau, the “dean of rock critics,” was writing in The Village Voice about his favorite Clash record, which just happened to be the one he made himself: a tape of all the band’s non-LP B-sides. One aspect really struck me – Christgau said it was a tape he made to give to friends. He had made his own personalized Clash record and was handing it out as a memento of his rock-and-roll devotion.
In those days, tape decks were as essential as turntables and just as bulky. But then Sony came out with the Walkman. I suppose the record industry expected consumers to buy cassettes of the LPs, and some surely did, but hey – why not just buy blank cassettes and record tracks from LPs instead? Of course, this is what every Walkman user did, and before long there were warning stickers on records and cassettes, stating: home taping is killing music! It was a quaint forebear of today’s industry paranoia over downloading and CD burning.
Around 1980, there was a spontaneous scene of young bands recording singles of superfast hardcore punk – Minor Threat, Negative Approach, Necros, Battalion of Saints, Adolescents, Sin 34, the Meatmen, Urban Waste, Void, Crucifucks, Youth Brigade, the Mob, Gang Green. I was fanatical and bought them all as soon as they came out. I was just a dishwasher at a SoHo restaurant – not exactly raking in the dough – but I needed these sides!
I also needed to hear these records in a more time-fluid way, and it hit me that I could make a mix tape of all the best songs. So I made what I thought was the most killer hardcore tape ever. I wrote H on one side, and C on the other. That night, after my love Kim had fallen asleep, I put the tape in our stereo cassette player, dragged one of the little speakers over to the bed, and listened to it at ultralow thrash volume. I was in a state of humming bliss. This music had every cell and fiber in my body on heavy sizzle mode. It was sweet.
On a Sonic Youth tour in the mid-’80s, we decided to get a cassette player for the van. One idea was to install a dashboard unit, but that was pricey. There was a street trend in NYC of hip hop heads blasting rap mix tapes through massive boom boxes, or “ghetto blasters.” So I went into this Delancey Street store and, using the band’s limited funds, bought the biggest boom box on display: a Conion that took 16 D batteries. The Conion – we nicknamed it “the Conan” – was almost like an extra body, about the size of a small kid. My solution was to stand it on end between the two front seats, facing the back. As we drove through the Holland Tunnel and began to distance ourselves from the city, I jammed in the first of the rap compilations I’d made, and the boom box sounded superb.
We had it onstage with us when we played, and I miked it through the PA for between-song tape action. Kids gave us cassettes all across the US – some of them hopeful demos and some mix tapes, and we’d jam them all. By tour’s end, there must have been hundreds of tapes strewn about the van, with their plastic cases stomped and cracked.
These days, CD technology has displaced the cassette in the mainstream, and mix CDs have become the new cultural love letter/trading post. For those of us who think that digital delivers a harsher sound than analog, it’s a sonic nightmare dealing with the new world reality of MP3s. They’re even more compressed and harsh than CDs, and in the case of vintage grooves – be it Led Zeppelin, Bad Brains, or Pavement – sound even more detached from musical vibration.
But even if MP3 music sounds lame, as long as it’s recognizable in form, free, and shareable, it’s here to stay. It will get better as more sophisticated methods of replication emerge. For now, its clunk is glamorized by celebrity iTunes playlists. ITunes has become the Hallmark card of mix tapes – all you gotta do is sign your name to personalize it.
Once again, we’re being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it’s not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing – by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along – is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.
Adapted from Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, edited by Thurston Moore, to be published by Universe in May.
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