mix tapes
I love that mix tape, and had to through it out the window when my favorite song was over on the highway to Victoria at 120 miles per hour. A good mix tape has beauty and power, the power to change your fucking life, and that’s just the trouble. It’s easy to get too attached to a good mix tape when what you need is the messianic prophecy of a new one, so I crucified my favorite mix tape on the side of the interstate so its gospel could live forever. We are loosing so much to the convenience of the future, more than we realize until the paralysis of retrospect kicks in. Adding favorite songs to a playlist and burning them to a CD is easy. But Marx said some shit right for a dead guy with a beard, “Value extends from labor.” Unlike most economic theory that concept becomes more relevant when applied to the dynamics of friendship, instead of less relevant. A mix CD can never articulate what extends automatically from evening spent manually recording those songs to cassette.
When producing a mix tape it is vital to treat the medium as an art form. Otherwise a mix tape is just a collection of songs and the process itself about romantic as filling out paperwork. The pause button exists for a reason. In the right hands, it’s a paint brush, or the killer electric distortion guitar from the greatest mid-western hardcore band that tore through your friends basement all summer. Use the pause button to splice songs, add commentary to them, or make those dope breakdowns as long as they should have been. And if you haven’t made a mix tape for years, then tonight is the night! Pick someone who means it all to you and let it crash on a celluloid like a brick through a cop car window. And don’t let them say they don't have a tape deck, they’ll fucking find one! Trust the power of the mix tape as generations have before us.
