Which is better – the mixtape or the playlist? The mixtape – in the days before it meant a hip-hop artist giving stuff away for free – was the purest product of the cassette age, a lovingly prepared journey through someone’s musical taste. Ultimately, it was the cassette recorder’s unique feature – it’s almost impossible to skip between tracks – that defined the mixtape; its maker controlled the rise and fall, the moods and the motion. It was a democratised concept album with a very particular, personal story.
“The mixtape is a form of American folk art,” CalArts professor Matias Viegener wrote in 2005. “I am no mere consumer of pop culture, it says, but also a producer of it. Mixtapes mark the moment of consumer culture in which listeners attained control over what they heard, in what order and at what cost.”
Mixtapes were, of course, limited to records you had or could borrow. For the tape generation, dogma and genre defined the parameters. If the mixtape is art, then it’s the early Renaissance – with strict rules and regular structures.
Playlists, conversely, allow us to luxuriate in the infinite possibilities of self-expression now that every single song ever recorded is available. The vast expanse of digital technology means playlist mixes can be epic, sprawling quests across a couple of hours, an entire evening or – in the case of my friend Mhairi Crossan’s mellow funk Spotify playlist Easy – around three-and-a-half days. As art it’s Warhol’s pop sampling – anything is legitimate. Nothing is sacred.
This flexibility can be intimidating – but it does remove the Mixtape’s Greatest Conundrum …
“When you had a cassette with just a minute and half recording time left, the big question was: do you let a song die halfway through or leave 90 seconds of silence?” my music journalist friend Will explains. “Killing An Arab always ends around the second chorus for me because my brother once made me a mixtape with that at the end of one side.”
Having every song ever available at their disposal means the digital native generation have largely avoided the Curse of the Trainspotter – who would load up an unsuspecting Maxell C90 with far too many average or terrible songs, simply because they were rare or hard to come by. Northern Soul fans, I’m talking to you.
But does this mean there’s a huge difference between the mixtapes of my painstaking 16-year-old self – let’s call him Steve16 – and the playlists of the adult he became? And when my daughters put their playlists together, is the process so different to my antiquated assembly methods?
I hauled out a dusty box of old C60s to show the girls – and my, how they laughed at my mixtape names. Playlist names are much, much shorter: gym mix; funk; happy soul; headsdownthrash. But the mixtapes aspired to poetry: we had Songs For Fish (Think) and its sequel Songs For Trees (Do); and Tunes From a Rich and Fruitful Culture Vol I-IV. That sort of thing.
On to the contents … oh my God, the humanity. For a start, there’s an awful lot of stuff that Steve16 placed great faith in – the “please love me” songs that he was convinced, in the face of all evidence, would get him laid. My mixtapes were usually made for one person – a girl I was trying to snog. It was a carefully curated voyage through an idealised version of my soul and included more than a few tracks that I didn’t actually like but thought would impress her. Like anything by the Smiths. They were love letters, in other words, and as painful to hear as any adolescent poetry.
These days, playlists are rarely true love letters. Instead, they’re potentially something more complex and exciting. “Making a mixtape was a very solo experience,” explains Bern Roche Farrelly, who works at the Poetry Translation Centre and thus knows his emotional narratives. “It was a letter you’d write and send and hope. But a playlist can be collaborative – you add a song, the other person adds a song … it’s like a conversation that can go on forever.”
Some things haven’t changed though. I Don’t Want to Live with Monkeys by The Higsons, for instance, never gets old. It’s a great opening track for mixtape and playlist alike, with its nonsense chanting, discordant guitars, fatback bass and angry horns. Steve16 would approve. He’d also like the “all-killer no-filler” element to playlists – similar to the handful of car journey mixes he made so bursting with spectacular tunes that no one would dare say: “This is crap, let’s put my tape on.”
For my daughters, plundering my mixtapes added a whole new direction to their playlists. Hearing my 15-year-old singing Dexys Midnight Runners seems … I don’t know … I want to warn her that that band ruined my life. But she has to have her life ruined her own way, right?
But there’s one more purely personal thing that will never make the jump to this generation.
My teenage stereo had an open cassette deck – so you could slip a piece of paper over the erase head and multitrack or mix two songs. Heavily influenced by mid-80s sampling, I largely used this to cut up James Brown shouting “All aboard! The night train!” to say “All aboard, aboard, the night train night train. All aboard! The night train!” And then I played Night Train by Visage. Nothing that Spotify’s weirdest curators could do would even come close to being that irritating.
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