A Mildly Unhinged Ode to the Mixtape
On our love for this retro technology, one of our two March Madness finalists.
They say that hard work pays off, and nowhere was this truer than when it came to the mixtape. The process was painstaking: hunched over a two-slotted cassette player or next to two boomboxes, you’d have your tapes spread out around you as the recorded tape stayed firmly in the player. Creativity aflame, you’d carefully select the pitch-perfect next song, pop the tape in, cue it up and press play/record, then stop at the exact right time — even a one-second delay would mean you had to rewind and record again. (Recording from the radio required even quicker cat-like reflexes.) Click-listen-click, click-listen-click, over and over again until the tape was complete — but you weren’t finished yet. You had to carefully write the tracklist, then decorate the cover to accurately reflect both your personality and every emotion contained within the tape.
Were there any greater words to a teenager or young adult in the 80s and 90s than hearing, “I made you a mix”? The process could take hours, making the mixtape the ultimate show of friendship, an undeniable demonstration of affection in any form. A good mixtape contained messages both overt and subtle, and was an aural catalog of memories and inside jokes that also contained hopes for the future. And even though the process was tedious, it was also completely overflowing with joy and excitement as you pictured the recipient and thought hard about what song they’d like the hear or what track you really wanted to share.
It was a bona fide love language.
Sure, the mixtape morphed into new technologies: a CD-cassette recording process, then burning CD-to-CD. Now, the MP3 playlist makes it easy to craft a musical journey for someone with just a few clicks. But there’s something missing: the effort. West Elm Caleb was dragged for sending girls the same playlist and claiming he made it for them. But he never would have gotten in this mess with a mixtape. You had to truly care to create a mixtape.
Which, in a world of Instagram likes and superficial social media exchanges, seems to be exactly what’s missing.
(For a deeper dive on the mixtape, check out this five-episode Radiolab podcast series, which explores everything from the history to the cultural impact.)
