Category — Project Mixtape

I’ve been committing some more random mixtapery (and mix-cd-ery) and I’m starting to fall into that rut of relying a lot on a handful of artists that I’m really, really into right now to the neglect of the other gigs and gigs of great music at my disposal.  So I’m trying to come up with some handicaps, some hoops to jump through.

Like making a mixtape of nothing but instrumentals that cannot include classical music.

Which is your project.

Show your work in the comments.

I’m not posting the playlist yet because I delivered it to its intended recipient with no playlist written on the cover.  In part because I did it last-minute, yeah, but it’s a mix of stuff that I know she knows and stuff that I know she doesn’t, and I want to see how she reacts to the mix as an aggregate and not just on a song-by-song basis. And so, in the spirit of that, I’m going to wait until I know she’s listened to it.

Okay, so finding an actual cassette tape?  It’s goddamn impossible.  I have a pack of blank cassettes that it took me literally forever to find (I traveled back in time to when I emerged from the womb and have been hunting relentlessly ever since), and gotten the dust off the tape recorder.  But still not so much with the tape-making.  I haven’t been home a lot, haven’t been seriously thinking about playlists.

Remember how I said that making a tape for a girl you didn’t want to sleep with was harder?  Well, now that I’m right in the midst of doing it, making a mixtape for a girl that you want to sleep with who has the exact same musical taste is maybe the hardest thing in the world.  I luckily got to spend part of Saturday night paging through the girl’s My Music folder, so I know exactly where we don’t Venn.

But then, the right tape isn’t just “this is music that’s new to you.”  It tells a story.  It communicates feelings.  A good mixtape is a like a kiss you experience with your ears.  Some of it should be new and exciting, but part of it needs to be timeless and familiar.

I should have the list finalized soon, and I’ll post it in its entirety then.

As excruciatingly hard as it can be to craft the perfect mixtape for a girl that you desperately want to sleep with, crafting a mixtape for a girl that you don’t want to sleep with is even harder.  It certainly seems at the outset to be easier - just pick a bunch of songs you like and then put them on a tape - but one thing that my life (and Star Wars) has taught me is that nothing will ever be as easy as it appears to be.

If you’re making a mixtape for a girl that you like, song selection is important.  The mixtape is a block of wood and the playlist is a lathe that you’re using to turn out the elegant ups, downs and flourishes of the emotional journey that you’re sending l’objet d’amour on (or, at least, like, hoping to send them on).

Using a lathe isn’t easy.  There’s a reason you have to sign that waiver on the first day of wood shop.

The problem in making a mixtape for a girl friend that you don’t experience painful, unrequited pangs for, is that every song placement, every lyric, every hand clap needs to be analyzed endlessly to ensure that The Wrong Message (TM) isn’t being sent.  That the tone is, “This is some cool music that I like,” and not “I’m giving this to you under the guise of being some cool music that I like, but there’s a secret, Dan-Brown-esque code embedded within this tape that will show you the true and unerring map of my heart.”  The potential for misinterpretation is huge and anxiety-making.

Maybe I should close with a song that is unromantic.  Antiromantic.  Maybe the whole thing should be antiromantic.  “Here’s a tape I made about how little I like you.”  It would probably have lots of Misfits on it, and some old school Metallica.  Some Gregorian Chant.  Some Christian rock about celibacy and how badass it is.  Bits of the Star Trek score.

Maybe I’m overthinking this.

So I was out last night and my buddy John and I started waxing poetic about mixtapes.  Not mix CDs.  Making a CD for someone is cool, or filling up a jump drive with music, or beaming a song straight into their brains via nano-powered Song Guns, but it’s not a mixtape.  Sharing music in any format is a soul-affirming experience, but there’s something about the effort involved in crafting the perfect mixtape and producing the actual tape - a much more labor-intensive process than making a CD.

We did an impromptu survey and - shockingly - none of the girls in our group had ever received a mixtape from a boy.  So now we have a project: we’re each going to craft a mixtape for about five of our coworkers and also probably for the waitress.  This is going to mean dusting off the dual-deck tape recorder and buying some blank tapes for the first time in years, but I think it’ll be a fun diversion.  And I’ll probably blog some more about the mixtaping as it’s going on or after it’s done - one of the two.

So, Single Reader, tell me about the last mixtape you received/gave.  What was on it?