Requiem for a mix tape...

I was cleaning out part of our storage room - you know, finally putting the Christmas tree away - and bumped into a mix tape that a friend of mine who was with me in Aberdeen. The tape was a snapshot of her musical tastes during the summer that we came back to the States. It reminds me of her and of an entire year of my life, and it's one of the last mix tapes that I've got. There are a half dozen or so mix tapes that I've got from my now-wife, then-girlfriend, and the sight of the tapes sitting there together in my memory tub (a big, green Rubbermaid, in case you were curious) made me sad.

I've watched movies with my parents and seen chracters explain things that I've asked the 'rents about, knowing the the words meant something to them but that the emotional weight was lost on me, and the loss of the mix tape reminds me of Rob's (from High Fidelity) explanation of the work and time and planning that went into making a quality mix tape. For me, those words bring back floods of memories, tryng to ensure that the mix had the right pacing, that one song worked well with the next, worrying about whether there was enough room left on the tape, adding times, judging tempos. Those days, however, are gone.

The perfect quote comes from a Salon.com article,

Putting together a home-brewed compilation of songs used to be an act of love and art. Now it's just too damn easy to be worth caring about.

At first the mixtape evolved into the mix cd which still took some planning. Less work went into it, admittedly, because some computer graphic showed you exactly how much time was left on the cd, and you could polish things a bit by fading in and out (depending on the program), but if done right, the mix cd showed feeling and had some weight.

Then came the playlist. Typically slapped together in five or ten minutes, little thought given to the progress and ordering of the songs, able to be changed at a whim, likely to be listened to in an order different than the giver's plans if there were any. It's emphemeral. It's mutable. The playlist will likely be chopped up, added into other playlists, and its permenance, its emotional investment is gone.

I'm sad about it...sorry, folks...but it's my blog, and I'll be maudlin if I want to.

Luckily, there are a few other people who are trying to keep the memories alive.