27th
Chandler Bing and the “Subtle Art” of the Mixtape
Toward the end of the 2000 movie “High Fidelity,” John Cusack’s love-struck record store owner/narrator tells the audience, “The making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many Dos and Don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”
Cusack’s speech is as good an explanation of the mixtape’s virtues as one will ever find. Back when they were still made, the mixtape really was a kind of art. Unless your father was Quincy Jones, the most advanced piece of audio equipment under your roof throughout your teenage era probably required a lot of devotion, flipping the tape or replacing 2Pac with Joan Osborne when the time came. In other words, the creation of a mixtape was one of passion; it was a project that took up your entire evening. It was how you spent your night.
I found myself pondering Cusack’s speech – and the art of the mixtape – earlier this week while selecting mp3s for Muxtape, a music-sharing site that allows users to create online play-lists of up to 12 streaming songs. The site has (deservedly) been praised for its ease-of-use and striking visual minimalism, but one of Muxtape’s greatest gifts to music (or the one most signifigant to me, at least) is neither technical nor aesthetic. It’s philosophical, and therefore harder to pinpoint, and it is this: Muxtape – with its emphasis on quality (12 chosen songs) over quantity (an entire iTunes library) – has revived that “subtle art” of the mixtape championed by Mr. Cusack.
To the best of my knowledge, the mixtape’s slow death began sometime in the late ’90s, when home CD-burning technology essentially killed the analogue audiocassette. In most ways, this advancement was probably a good thing: CD’s are cheaper, hold more information, and make cooler Xena-style throwing discs than tapes.
But what was lost with the audiocassette was the incentive to put extended thought into self-made albums. No longer did horny adolescents have to spend Sunday night plopped between a stack of Boyz II Men tapes and Dad’s stereo system, meticulously copying “I’ll Make Love To You” onto some audio love-letter to a cute student in their SAT Prep class. Now, a cheap CD-R and 10 minutes on Napster were all that are needed to create “personal” compilations that ensure a 45-minute make-out session in the stairwell.
Of course, a mix CD still took some time, but most of that time was spent booting up one’s Compaq Presarios and telling mom to hang up the phone. However, what used to be the most time-consuming part – selecting the songs themselves – was now, thanks to the dics’ vast data storage size, the quickest. Why the fuck would anyone waste time choosing between “Californication” and “Scar Tissue” when there’s enough room for a half a dozen Chili Peppers singles?
But just because you can fit the entire discography of Anthony Kedis, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. After all, when you can add everything, songs start meaning nothing.
This was where the “art” came into the making of a mixtape: Throughout the Clinton years, the precious 90 minutes of recording time on a TDK compact were just enough for a satisfying lineup of songs, but still exclusive enough that the artistic pros and cons of each track had to be excruciatingly considered before being selected for your epic track listing. Yeah, you wanted to stick all of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” onto your VALENTINE’S DAY MIX ‘97, but the limits of technology forced you to choose just one of those songs to express the complex workings of your 15-year-old heart to the opposite sex (it was probably “Candle In The Wind,” by the way). The result was a tape that was a truly thoughtful gift – but only out of necessity.
This accidental thoughtfulness helped turn the mixtape into the (pardon the expression) sonnet of “Generation X,” a Bon Jovi-hating demographic way too cool and cynical to ever make something so romantic intentionally. It’s telling that within a month of “High Fidelity’s” release, NBC’s “Friends” (which was more-or-less the GenX “Leave It To Beaver”) premiered an episode (“The One With Unagi”) whose B-plot was primarily about a mixtape that Chandler gives to Monica as an anniversary present. More recently, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” a group of young ladies insist a mixtape is a far more romantic gift to receive from a guy than a CD. While they don’t go into detail on the matter, it’s fair to assume the women were swooning over the Cusack-like dedication necessary for a man to make a woman a mixtape. And who better to take our pop-cultural cues from than the dude who (briefly) made John Travolta cool again?
But it was – who else? – John Cusack himself, as Lloyd Dobler in 1988’s “Say Anything,” who stood outside Ione Skye’s bedroom window with a boombox over his head blasting “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel, successfully pulling off the single most romantic use of the mixtape in history.
