From Love is a Mix Tape by Robert Sheffield, Random House, 2007.
“I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist’s entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that moment over and over. A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove. Walter Benjamin, in his prescient 1923 essay “One Way Sweet,” said a book was an outdated means of communication between two boxes of index cards. One professor goes through books, looking for tasty bits he can copy onto index cards. Then he types his index cards up into a book, so other professors can go through it and copy tasty bits onto their own index cards.
Benjamin’s joke was: Why not just sell the index cards? I guess that’s why we trade mix tapes. We music fans love our classic albums, our seamless masterpieces, our Blondes on Blondes and our Talking Books. But we love to pluck songs off those albums and mix them up with other songs, plunging them back into the rest of the manic slipstream of rock and roll. […] Most mix tapes are CDs now, yet people still call them mix tapes. The technology changes, but the spirit is the same. I can load up my iPod with weeks’ worth of music and set it on shuffle to play a different mix every time. I can borrow somebody’s else iPod and pack it with songs I think they’d like. I can talk to a friend on the phone, mention a couple of songs, download them on LimeWire while we’re talking, and listen together. The hip-hop world now thrives on mix tapes, with artists circulating their rhymes on the streets via bootleg CDs. They’re never technically tapes, but they’re always called mix tapes anyway, just because tapes are always cool. It’s a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving. […]
I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up the story of a life”
(Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape, 2007, 23-26).
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