My Mixtape Romance

Has technological advancement become arbitrary? When my friends show me iPhone apps that can identify their DNA and track the journey of their turd from toilet to ocean I think it’s cool and all, but pointless and sad too.

In kind of the same vein, so many people I know say the more music they have on their iPod the less they listen to – just around five albums over and over. A lot of people, myself included, upload albums to show off like a friends list on Facebook; but still just stick to the usual suspects.

So what’s the point of carrying around your record collection if it just sits there?

There was a time when the Walkman changed the world. Music became portable and personal – kids didn’t have to listen to their parents’ Abba tapes on family road trips anymore, they could plug the latest Pop Shop into their ears; and on the bus you could tune out the grannies’ gossip with equally depressing Cure tunes.

And you have to respect that while the iPod can store every album you own, the Walkman practically birthed our culture of public solitude. When we could personalise albums we began building soundtracks suited to our mood swings.

There’s something about making a mix tape (or Mixtape) that an iTunes playlist can’t match.

Back in the day, a ninety minute cassette compilation would take at least two hours to produce. When you gave it to your girlfriend she appreciated the effort you put in – not only having to listen to every song all the way through, but also obsessing over the flow of tracks.

You’d sometimes record six songs, then rewind back over the last four because you realised the third would be better a few tracks later. Sometimes one mix tape would take a whole day to make – you’d call it something like ‘OCD Hits’, and neatly write each song title and artist on the cassette-holder insert.

Nick Hornby believed that making a mix tape was an art, and outlined the rules in his novel High Fidelity: “To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention… and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules.”

The same way that sending an email just isn’t the same as posting a letter, a mix cd lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Maybe it’s because, embedded in even the smallest romantic act is an element of the personal touch.

Nowadays, when we fuck up, burning a cd of love songs is faster than popping down the corner café to buy flowers, and therefore just as meaningless.

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