Requiem For A Mix Tape

"When I was just a skinny lad on holiday by the sea/I met a girl in a Rancid shirt, and a tape she gave to me/With the Black Flag First Four Years and the Minor Threat Discography/And punk rock saved my life." -- Frank Turner

Whatever happened to the mix tape?

Don't go blowing a fuse trying to answer that; it's a rhetorical question. Believe me, I know full well what happened to the mix tape. Like production-line workers, library tickets and half-decent pop music, it got rendered obsolete by technology. Talk to anyone under the age of 21 about mix tapes, and they'll get that special glaze in their eye that you used to reserve for people who rattled on about pre-decimal currency. They got replaced by CD burners, innit? And get with the times, even they're prehistoric nowadays. What do you mean, you don't have an iPod? Come on, Grandad. You think Spotify's some kind of skincare product? As if.

But anyway. Mix tapes. They used to exist, roughly around the same time as unicorns and princesses with cone-shaped hats. And they were the most wonderful things, not least because they took actual effort to make, rather than the little orgies of button-pressing and flurries of click-and-drag that go into modern music playlists. I'm not just talking about the fundamentals of good song order; this still matters in the digital age, because at the end of the day, no-one wants to go straight from the final bittersweet piano chords of REM's Nightswimming to the opening strains of, say, Hammer Smashed Face by Cannibal Corpse. A hospital visit could result from that kind of poor segue.

No, there are skills and arts that have died along with the mass-produced blank cassette. Skills such as calculating the lengths of each of your selected tracks in order to avoid a song getting cut off at the end of the spool. There was nothing worse than hitting the bridge section of a belting tune, with the guitarist widdling away at the fretboard like a man possessed, only for the cassette to interrupt him. If there's one thing you must never do, it's interrupt a guitarist in mid-widdle.

So, ensuring each side of your playlist was as damn near 45 minutes as you could humanly craft it was paramount. Secondly, it was vital to have the whole recording process planned and executed in one take, using only the pause button to halt recording between songs. The telltale thunk of the STOP button being pressed in between tracks was the mark of an amateur mix-taper, someone whose opinions about music (and by extension, everything else of importance in the world) was worth less than nothing. Maybe even less than that.

But above all, there was a romance about mix tapes that I feel is sadly lacking from modern-day home-made compilations in all their different forms. Simply by virtue of the time, thought and effort that went into it, a mix tape was always a worthwhile present to give or receive. I owe many of my lasting relationships with people, bands and whole genres of music to carefully crafted cassettes. So many of the sounds of yesteryear are, in my mind, associated with the inky inlay card sketched by a schoolmate at the age of thirteen, designed specifically to introduce me to the EXCELLENT SONGS he'd picked out from his own collection (not to mention EXCELLENT SONGS II, EXCELLENT SONGS III, and THE VERY BEST OF EXCELLENT SONGS. When it came to naming tapes, there was just no stopping his dynamo of an imagination). Likewise, I've bestowed the benefits of my eclectic taste in music on so many souls over the years via the medium of 90 minutes of blank tape. Unlike an online playlist, it was a physical gift. Unlike a burned CD, it contained personality, the fruits of physical labour. It was my heart wrapped up inside a hard square of plastic and chrome.

But their time is done, it seems. At least until cassettes make a retro comeback. On that day I hope a new generation can discover for themselves that technology is not always the way forwards, not least because it's a lesson worth learning for our society as a whole. And it could just be that a mix tape will save us all. Probably not EXCELLENT SONGS III, which was a little bit shit in all honesty, but perhaps one of its many, infinitely more worthy brethren, somewhere in the mix.