Manifesto for a Mixtape Mafia.

May 2005

Maybe I’m just a total Luddite techno-phobe. Maybe I just hate spending money on gadgets. Maybe they’re just too ubiquitous now. Maybe I’m suspicious of the hip advertising onslaught and the status symbol headphones. Maybe it’s because they seem to envelope, erase and overtake all those years I spent at first scraping and then gradually snowballing together a CD collection—that triumphant first feeling of finally having enough to fill the long side of a whole shoe box—or maybe I’m just bitter and jealous. But I’ll say it once now so that, if or when I have to retract it later, I’ll remember this as a purer, simpler time.

I. Hate. iPODS. iHATE iPODS. Ha! I Hate Them!

Now this isn’t because I have any sense of loyalty to CDs—soulless, skipping, scratch-able rip offs that they are. Neither is it because I’m anywhere close to being a vinyl junkie. No, I pledge allegiance to that least glamorous vehicle of recorded sounds. The trusty alliance of blank cassette and compact disc and, here they are, their immaculate love children—mixtapes.

They used to say that home taping was killing music, but I see it rather as making it—procreating it. Definitely not “burning” it, anyway. There’s an art to the mixtape—an art and a beautifully living, breathing, amateurish humanity to it. When you hear that “shurclunk” between songs then you know that it registers the pad of a poised finger astride the Play/Rec. buttons. You know that at least as much real time goes into the making of it as into that first, exploratory listen. You feel the maker hovering in the background static. And, to be sure, each has his or her own alchemical methods.

Do you assiduously plan the tracklisting down to the last second before you start or do you play it by ear once things start rolling? How far do you go to maintain the balance between including what you think the person ought to like and what you think they actually will like? To what creative ends can A and B sides be put? What happens if the tape ends mid track? Are double appearances by the same band acceptable? Do you favour seamless links or juxtapositions? Surely you bother to make accompanying artwork? Do you list the tracks or leave the listener feeling their way through blind? Liner notes? How much do you reveal? Do you keep the tape and listen to it for a while first, just to check it’s not a dud—then there’s also always the danger that you might just keep it…

And, let’s be honest, a properly planned mixtape always has a hidden or not-so-hidden agenda. For a start, there’s no such thing as pure altruism here—even if you discount the hours of fun that go into these labours of love. Whether it be marking an occasion, demonstrating your painfully eclectic tastes, setting yourself off on a righteous indie-fuelled crusade to “educate,” implying an “I Love You” or memorializing a break up with a secret sonic FUCK YOU, there is always a subtext—it’s always about you. I’ll admit to having been on both ends of most of the above, not forgetting also the birthday tapes, “best of…” tapes, party tapes, clubbing tapes, come down tapes, going to sleep tapes, seasonal tapes, nostalgia tapes, road trip tapes, tapes about being unemployed, requiems for firebombed Ford Escorts…

The possibilities are endless. For a time, my family used to make summer holiday mixtapes to listen to in the car on long drives to Devon. These supposedly preempted the need to squabble over the stereo and, in the view of my brother and I, shaved precious half hours off Dad’s inevitable Radio Four hegemony. On a recent nostalgia tack, I searched high and low for one of these familial relics but, alas, to no avail. Segues between, as I recall, Welsh Male Voice Choirs, “Cigarettes and Alcohol,” “Sultans of Swing” and “Karma Police” would, I don’t doubt, have set a new kind of bar for the shuffling “Life Is Random” iPOD brigade.

I hate those fucking adverts, not just cos the 2D ravers are ten million times the dancers I’ll ever be, but because they con people into thinking that there’s a romance and mythology about iPODs that just doesn’t ring true. Tell me this—would you rather have someone slip you a tape or offer to lend you a few CDs to upload? Would you rather have a playlist sliding by in a digital identi-font or etched in uniquely recognizable scribble?

iPODs make me want to photograph the entangled brown entrails of eviscerated cassettes as they are blowing in the wind, develop them in sepia tones and frame them in elaborate gold-leafed curls.

I want to make mixtapes for every person who plugs their ears with the space-age white of a marketing board’s inspired decision (inspired, that is, until the muggers caught on), for every person who has a memory stick instead of a photo album, every would-be couple who texts rather than converses, and for every writer who has a blog instead of rather than as well as a diary.

I’m scared that those hours spent flicking through shit vinyl in Oxfam or even along the CD lined shelves of friend’s houses will be replaced by the minute oscillations of index fingers, trammeling through neatly subdivided lists. What happens when-—wash my blasphemous mouth out!—iPODs become obsolete? Do the young cats groovin’ in the two-tone ads ever get tired? Did the salesman tell them that their batteries die?

The ritual exchange of plastic and cellophane(?) infuses collections and delectations in a way that tangibly registers the intertwining of new loves and discoveries with people, times and places. So no, this isn’t the same as file sharing. Do MP3s bear the marks of from whence they came? Mixtapes are little pieces of a person. That’s why you can never—ever—destroy one. I wonder where some of my tapes are now. Did the ones made for long-since-estranged exes end up on a bonfire somewhere? I know my brother taped over one once—surely the biggest tape-makers bitch slap of them all? I also know that one was stolen from a car parked in Detroit. Did the robber ever listen to it? Are my tapes loved or lost or left to rot? Are they in walkmans, racks, boxes, glove compartments or land fill sites? Did they beget purchasing sprees or turn people off for life?

I can’t answer that and so instead I would like to dedicate this to all those whose carefully crafted progeny I have adopted and cherished as my own…Mella, Simon, Tim, Courtney, Steve, mixmaster Greg, Gassy, Dave, Amy, Richard, Martin…And to those who have been saddled with my offspring at various times and at least pretended to enjoy their company.