Music is my time machine.
I just made a mixtape.
I just made a mixtape.
Yeah, you read that right. And no, I don’t mean it in the
figurative sense. I actually busted out the old boombox and made a literal
mixtape on an actual cassette!
(I can’t believe that thing still works! I’m so excited! And
yeah— I used to love making mixtapes so much that I bought tons of blank cassette
tapes. So I found some still-wrapped cassettes in a box somewhere.)
*
The soundtrack of our lives. We know what this is.
It’s that moment you’re driving to work and out of nowhere
SWV’s “Weak” comes on the radio (yes, you still listen to FM radio because
you’re old school like that) and suddenly you’re transported to that summer you
took a creative writing class at Rutgers before your junior year. You don’t
remember much about what actually happened that summer. You only remember
driving towards Frelinghuysen (ah, the River Dorms!) in your blue-gray Toyota
Camry with all the windows down, blasting this song, singing along at the top
of your lungs.
And it’s that time you’re in a bar, having a beer with a
friend, talking about the poetry reading you just attended and suddenly Pearl
Jam’s “Daughter” comes on. Boom! You’re back in that white passenger van, full
of drunk college kids with your French professor at the wheel, barreling down
narrow mountain roads past midnight on an icy-cold night, having just left a
club in Geneva called L’usine, shooting across the Alps toward your hotel in
Evian. Yes, you think. Yes, that really happened. Yes, you, an English major,
took an economic course during a Winter session just to travel to France (If
you must know, the course was looking at the economics of EuroDisney and Evian.
But I suspect that the professors created this course for the sole purpose of
traveling to France). And you remember the entire van singing along with
slurred laughter. “Don’t call me dauuuugherrrr…”
*
Memory is triggered by our senses. There’s a specific smell
to the building where I had most of my college classes: Pardee Hall. Once, I
visited as an adult with a college friend and when we entered the building, we
both commented on how suddenly, we were 19 again. And to describe the smell is
impossible. Really. How does one describe the scent of a humanities building?
It definitely smells different from a science building. What words does one
use? “It smells like paper? Like concrete?” No, not quite.
Music is amazing. Like I said at the start: it’s my personal time machine. I can go to
any time period I want. I just cue up a song and whammo! I’m there. Madonna’s
“Like a Virgin” – woo, boy. That was an awkward time. Depeche Mode’s “Personal
Jesus”? All funked-up, Doc Maarten-wearing, black-is-the-only-color Pinay.
Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”? Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “If I Had a
Hammer”? That might have been the very early stages of my hippie self (yeah, I
said it: I’m a goddamn hippie! Hahaha! But a hip-hop head, too. So yeah. Make
of that what you will.).
*
But what I really wanted to talk about is the mixtape.
(Yeah, I’m gonna pull out my old lady card right now. Haha!)
There’s an art to making a mixtape. Sure, you’ve got the
playlists. Just click and drag some songs into a file. You’re done. The
mixtape? Well, it’s a little more involved.
First, there’s the songs themselves. Which ones do you put
on the tape? What message do you want to communicate? Fun? Party? Crush? Love? Heartbreak?
Breakup? (Yeah, there are breakup mixtapes. Instead of saying “I want to
breakup with you”, you just hand them a tape.) (There are also the mixtapes
that were passed around to promote DJs and upcoming bands and underground shit.
That was some real good stuff! I miss those days of randomly finding a tape in
my hands –this person gave it to this person who gave it to me— and loving it!)
Then there’s song order. Order is EVERYTHING. Not just in
lyric message but in sound. Does this rock song seamlessly transition into the
next ballad? There’s a lot of sound testing before the final order of the list
is solidified.
Next, there’s the actual recording of the songs. Back in the
day of tape decks (god, I sound like a legit old lady!! Bwahaha!), you’d record
the song –whether you had the actual album on cassette or just recorded it off
the radio. Then –at least this is what I used to do—you’d take the mixtape out
and manually rewind a little of the tape before recording the next song in
order to cut the dead airtime between songs.
Timing is everything. You need to know how long each song is
so you can figure out how many songs to put on one side before flipping over to
the other side. You also want to maximize that sound time. Unless, of course,
you’re making a breakup tape and you only have a handful of songs to send the
message. In that case, well, silence is probably your friend.
Think you’re done? Nope!
There’s the presentation of the mixtape itself. You need to
take that little cardboard insert and write the list of songs. If there’s room
and it’s important to you, you’ll include the artist/group with the song
titles. Then, you need to name the mixtape. Ask yourself: what’s the meaning
behind this collection of songs? I have a mixtape from college called “The A-10
Mix” – that was the name of my on-campus apartment and this mix was what my
housemates and I listened to while getting ready to go out (Kids these days
call it pre-gaming. What a funny word… Ah, spoken like a true old lady.). Not
exactly the most inventive of titles, but you get the idea. You can also title
each side, depending on your musical selections. One tape I had (the name of
which escapes me right now) had Side A as “Daybreak” and Side B as “Evening”. I
know! I know! Not exactly clever. But the songs on Side A were quicker and
upbeat. Side B, you guessed it, were slow ballads. Sooo, yeah. You get the
idea. And if you want, you can put the date on it too. I like knowing when a
mixtape was born.
You think it stops there? Nope!
If you’re like me, girly and arts-and-crafty, well, you’re
going to want to put something on the other side of that little cardboard
insert. An image. Some words cut out of a magazine. Something visual. Visual to
complement the audio. This is totally optional, but it adds to the message of
your mixtape. Like with poetry, in a mixtape everything is intentional
and carries meaning.
Hearing Pearl Jam’s “Daughter” got me nostalgic. I felt like
19 again. So I started listening to music from the early to mid 90s. And then I
felt like making a mixtape. But this time I had digital help. While putting
together a playlist isn’t quite as laborious as stacking tapes next to the tape
deck, I don’t mind. I even got to choose the length of silence between the
songs (I chose 2 seconds). No more manual turning of the magnetic tape.
So how did I make an actual cassette mixtape, you wonder?
Well, I worked in technological reverse: playlist burned to CD. CD recorded to
cassette tape. (And, I’ll tell ya: pressing the <Record> and <Play>
buttons simultaneously on my old boombox brought such a big smile to my face.) Voila!
Your mixtape!
Now, if only I can find that Walkman…
I call this my White Girl Mix. Don't judge me for my musical tastes! Brown Girl Mix coming soon!
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