Monday, May 05, 2008
Mix It Up
Hey welcome back me, I’ve been to a blogger meetup in philly and damn but I had a good time with it. I’ll have photos of buildings and graffiti and rust stains and all that chuckly sort of thing soon enough (ie, once I’ve gotten around to it), but now I’m sort of tired and just want to slap a new post up here so I can sleep easy tonight. Lucky for me, I’ve got here a letter I wrote to the local paper about a story they recently ran, which I had sort of intended originally to make into a blog post. And just that easily, it is one! Enjoy and watch this space for Photodelphia, upcoming soon....
Partly, it was because it was a physical thing you’d made yourself, a companion that had been with you through the great times that made the mix special, an inextricable association of specific perfect moments with that particular plastic case, that handwriting on that label.... the musical aspects became confounded with the historical aspects, all of it somehow investing the cassette itself with an actual personality. The mix tape was, in a sense, as much about the tape as it was about the mix.
In 1991 I celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time with a close group friends whose weddings I’ve witnessed, children I’ve cradled, lives I’ve shared ever since. It was an extravagantly gluttonous affair, a great, raucous, soul-satisfying feast. We started having these Thanksgivings together every year, starting in 1991. Funksgiving ‘91.
That was the mix I produced as an honorary soundtrack to what I knew would be a momentous event. I really worked hard on it and it came out great - all the segues and builds combining seamlessly into 90 perfect minutes of auditory entertainment for the best dinner party of the year. I gave a copy to our hosts and listened to my own copy for years thereafter, annually adding a new edition each Thanksgiving day, all painstakingly executed, each a proud achievement in its own right: Heal This Chicken ‘92, Gallinaceous Boogie ‘93, Funky Drumstick ‘94, Chipotle Salsa, Hot Yams, Savory....
Ten years on: the medium of ferric oxide had grown moribund, almost irrelevant. I would hand someone a tape and they’d no longer be set up to play it. Though I’d craft new tapes as a gift from my heart, they were increasingly seen as something quaint and pitiful. With Oven Ready 2001, the series staggered to a halt.
Now I’ve got more music than I’ve ever had before, freed from analog fetters and the clunky inconvenience of physical objectification. My iPod holds more of a library than I’d possibly have been able to manage on LPs and cassettes, and I can slap together mixes in moments, adjusting song orders and sound levels with the click of a mouse instead of painstaking cue-ups and re-recordings. The process is now so simple that I no longer save the effort for Thanksgiving, and make new mixes all year long. The Thanksgiving mix is now just my current “on the go” playlist, celebratorily renamed.
I’d built some great new playlists, too, both holiday-oriented and more general, but when I moved my e-library to a new external drive I accidentally ruined them all. Dozens of cleverly named, hard-driving mixes were suddenly rendered empty and null. I didn’t even mind much - they were too easily built to merit mourning. As I deleted from my hard drive the titles that now referred to vacant shells, I thought back to some of those dusty old cassettes I still keep archived in a shopping bag in my closet, persevering, unplayed, in spite of the technoglitches that negated newer, less storied, playlists. The music is still great, though by now a little dated… I can’t quite put my finger on it but it seems that, in the midst of musical plenty the likes of which I could never have imagined ten years ago, something has been lost. I know where it is, but I don’t think I’ll ever really get it back.
