Forsake Ye Not the Mixtape
Mixtapes were a thing. Remember those days? Even after CDs took over as your main medium for sung revelations of “like liking” that special someone — the embodied hot potential, the mixtape giftee — the OG cassette legacy lived on.
Every woman who hit the college dating scene somewhere from 1990–2007 probably received a mixtape at some point, and if we’re talking turn of the millennium, that mixtape probably included a track or two from Dispatch, a band that apparently lives eternally and exclusively off the dude side of campus life. For the college mixtapes made by the ladies, I bet you — I just bet — that Ani DiFranco made an appearance in your offerings.
Remember the fun of investigating the goods out of that track list — these lyrics, this style, the order of the songs themselves — to get at the hidden message, the real meaning, of this acoustic guitar decoder challenge? The population of singer-songwriters exploded in the late 90s/early aughts — spontaneous and ubiquitous. For such a time as this.
Mixtapes. What a world.
What’s the equivalent now, I wonder? Do youths today sit themselves down and hone their considerable mental energies toward crafting musical professions of love and/or lust and/or friendship? The only pop cultural reference to anything of the sort I’ve come across is a brief scene in Cobra Kai where a high school karate student makes a purposefully cheesy low-tech web card for his ex-girlfriend. There’s some awful rock ballad playing in the background, but the graphics are the real point. He’s put up a photo of the two together, both smiling and looking all gooey-eyed, followed by a cutout heart splitting in two.
It’s real dumb, but the camp aspect is what makes Cobra Kai what it is. This isn’t a diss.
I’m just perplexed as to how the current crop of youngsters are connecting, as they say.
I’m just worried it’s all online.
What you had to feel back then — what you did feel, I should say, what was the pervasive feeling of the era — was the sense of possibility. Your world was small, small enough to fit a mixtape in a CD player (a discman, God bless), or downloaded onto a fat plastic cuboid Mp3 player with no graphics and two buttons. You didn’t have the whole world at your fingertips. What you did have: a specific, curated set of songs from a person you met in class or at a bar or, saints above, at a frat party.
You had the cramped space of a dorm room with old, disgusting carpet and exposed brick and a window facing out onto the soccer field. You could take your mixtape in your discman and go out walking, headphones a bridge over your head, muffs for your ears. You had the trees and the fall air and a hot cup of cheap-ass 7-Eleven coffee because no self-respecting college student had money to blow on Starbucks.
None of this is available to you on a screen, children.
Of course what Andy Warhol said about our individual allotment of 15 minutes of fame has proven prophetic. You can’t deny him that.
But, look. I’ve been to the Andy Warhol museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh, I’ve ventured all the way to the top story and walked down seven flights of stairs to wander seven levels of Warhol’s life, and I’ve concluded that this man is not the person we should look to for prophecies. A hoarder, a user, a clever hack. Those life-size silver Elvis portraits notwithstanding, Warhol rarely moved beyond his first career as an advertisement illustrator for hire.
I don’t begrudge him his success. The amount of cold-blooded pomposity and incestuous backstabbing that comprises America’s “high art” scene defies quantification. Anyone who can work over that many pretentious weenies with money to snort deserves whatever he can get his hands on.
It follows that Warhol was a cynic. His capitulation to fame as America’s highest aspiration was meant to be a true take on reality, yes, but also depressing as hell. Drugs were the primary currency in Warhol’s infamous Factory, not art, because a worldview this bereft of depth or meaning demands friendly relations with heroin.
But nine out of ten Instagram accounts now showcase Warhol’s worldview, sans the implicit woe. Everybody’s out here trying to get those likes and comments, trying to get that influencer status, trying to win the social media race for fame, and they’re not being ironic or cynical about it. They’re doing it with soft-lit shots of coffee mugs inscribed by mind-killing platitudes about living your best life, and they mean these things, they mean all of it, in absolute earnest.
Good ol’ Andy wouldn’t need his diet pills here in 2022. He might, I think, depend on reliable nausea at the ghastly manifestation of his prognosticating:
Every single moment and interaction of absolutely anything crafted for sharing, crafted for monetizing — monetizing the self.
Alas, Andy. Alas, humanity.
On the opening point of mixtapes, would you give one today? There are two distinct possibilities. The first is: no. It takes thoughtfulness to put one of those compilations together, and thoughtfulness demands time, a precious resource in any era, but one in vanishingly small supply with a smartphone nearby. Distraction has never held a stronger hand, and we’re no longer in the mood to even feign resistance.
A handmade CD — voracious for attention and forever in danger of stumbling into schmaltz — stands no chance against the ease and low-stakes of emojis and Tik Tok shares. That’s life.
The second possibility: also no. Because whoever this mixtape is for, they can be relied upon to share it. To post about it on Facebook or snap a selfie with a caption about it for Instagram, or (worst case scenario) make a witty comment about it on Twitter, just vague enough to obscure whether the comment is sincere or… something else.
None of these eventualities will escape the mind of the mixtape maker, and will thus render the entire enterprise moot. If you do make a mixtape, you are no longer making it for the person. You are making it, in no small part, for their followers too. Their high-school friends and neurotic family, their employer and co-workers, their dormmate and drinking buddies, their exes, their acquaintances, their fans (sigh), the whole constellation of their connections, not to mention their aspirational public image.
It’s not: will they like this song? Does this help convey my feelings about them? (BASIC)
It is: will this play well with their online social presence? Does it help convey that I’ve rightly understood how they want to be read online?
In a way, we are returning to more primitive forms of courtship. Two people falling in love? Nah. The point is whether or not they are socially/economically/politically/culturally compatible with one another’s tribes.
I’ll concede America has never been terribly romantic or philosophical. We are, at the root, pragmatic optimizers. What really gets us jazzed: devising the easiest, quickest, most cost-effective way to accomplish anything, from fitness goals to product delivery, and if you consult the early literature of the nation, you’ll find that bootstrapping ethos present right from the start. There’s rarely consideration of the why for all this buzz. If something can be done, we’re gonna do it. That’s how you land on the moon, sure. Unlike a certain psychedelic rock band (notably British), we Americans are not much interested in its dark side, though…
And there was once space for other wanderings. For dreams that didn’t stop at freedom, but went beyond to ask: what’s this freedom for? There was a time when one answer was the possibility of transcendence — with God, or perhaps through nature, or maybe just in the random miracle of falling in love, all experiences that require mystery and defy reduction to data points or photo captions.
They require absolute presence in the moment, rapt attention and openness and goodwill to what is immediately in one’s specific line of sight, a singular event that cannot be shared with the masses.
But now, the wide world is charged and backlit and always awaiting, 24/7, at your fingertips.
Alas, transcendence. Alas, humanity.
