Eclectic Company: The Silence of the Mix Tapes

I can’t think of the last time a boy made me a mix tape, or burned a carefully selected and sequenced CD full of tunes he just had to have me hear. I remember that whenever I was given one, I felt as if I was in the presence of something holy. In the mid-1980s, when I was caught between my first ex-husband’s post-punk/new wave sensibilities that had upended my aural world and the traditional folk/singer-songwriter gestalt that had provided the soundtrack to my teens, I attracted loads of quirky, elegiac and novelty numbers from a handful of swain who had clearly taken seriously the job of hunting down the perfect songs with which to express themselves and their affections, making musical storyboards that traced connections they saw between themselves and me.

I assume they chose to woo with mix tapes because music had clearly become my business – working in live music venues and publicizing festivals, reviewing records and concerts, dj-ing a weekly radio show, writing publicity for a rapidly failing record label, et cetera. But for several years, these audio valentines were almost all the recorded music I could bear to listen to. I was already tired of music in one material way – listening professionally to literally thousands of records and bands over a dozen years had over-stimulated and numbed my ears; I’d hear just a few familiar-sounding quatrains on any commercial record or radio station and I’d have to turn down the volume or jump out of my skin. By then I was a full-time freelance music journalist. I couldn’t tell anyone, but I fretted about this all the time as I grew more and more sensitive and unresponsive to sound: How could I have anything to say, if I couldn’t bear to listen to music?

During these years when I didn’t even want to read a desert island discs list, let alone listen to one, a talented and persistent recording engineer friend sent demo tapes of everything he created in his New York City studio to whatever unlikely or exotic location I’d gotten to – even a few here to Lake Charles – and I always felt cherished and homesick just seeing his handwriting on the padded mailer that I knew would have something inside that would fizz on my jaded palate and might pique my interest. Early in our friendship, at my request, so the intro to my radio show would be familiar but different every week, he made me a reel-to-reel recording of nearly 40 different artists’ versions of the tune I’d chosen to sign on with. For me, locating and recording those tracks would have been an impossible task. From him, though he said he’d barely scratched the surface and had simply found those tracks in his own collection, making that tape for me was clearly an act of devotion.

Are there still mix tapes, and do boys still make them to give to girls they’re interested in courting? I remember that in a clearly divided world of chattering girls and the grunts that passed for communication from boys, a mix tape was a conversational gambit and better than any rose, because it was evidence that the sender had spent time – maybe hours – choosing what to say to bridge the distance between his awkward near-speech and her vocal, seemingly artless stream-of-consciousness banter, and how to say it just right, with music. I would have loved Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity anyway, but listening to record store owner John Cusack and his loser sales clerks Jack Black and Todd Luiso explain how (and why) to make a mix tape knocked me out.

And how do you make a mix tape in a world that doesn’t have that kind of attention span anymore anyway? These days I’m sure guys just zap a playlist to the object of affection’s iPhone, or pass her the tunes copied onto a spare jump drive, or casually, wirelessly, toss her some other technological bone I haven’t even heard of and surely don’t have the equipment to play it on. It takes only a few minutes to build a playlist on iTunes (I mean come on, even I can do it), and changing out songs that are wrongly sequenced or sound lame or perverse upon reviewing before sending is especially easy with the delete key. So how much art, or hope, or pursuit does that take?

I don’t know why, but it must be bad etiquette to make a mix tape for yourself, because you almost never hear of anyone doing it. And while you can get away with building a party mix to use at an appropriate social gathering, it’s not quite so cool to sit home crying into your Sangria, or to mix the soundtracks from Julia Roberts’ movies for your wedding reception. Might even be bad karma, especially if you’re a big fan of Runaway Bride (thank you Jennifer Crusie). It’s only twice occurred to me to make mix tapes for boys who were the objects of my affection – once, more than 20 years ago, while in the throes of an intense, platonic, emotional affair with another music critic I poured my heart out in recorded songs, but I’m pretty sure I never delivered that one (does he want more from me? too risky), and the second time, just a few years ago, I made and sent a mix tape to an odd duck who irritated me at almost every turn, creating an itch I kept trying, unsuccessfully to scratch. Eventually, he proved to be an unworthy object: Not only did he misunderstand the lyrics!?!, he absolutely failed to appreciate the meaning of the whole gesture. Besides, his musical tastes ran the gamut from A to B: Frank Sinatra to The Beatles. Both worthy, of course, but he had nothing outside those two pools of light. What kind of mix tape could he have sent me with that limited palate? It was ugly, but I did the only thing I decently could. I unfriended him.