mixtapemonday

Like everyone else, I made mixtapes throughout the 1980s and 90s. And like everyone else, I pretty much gave it up as MP3 technology became prevalent. When I stopped making mixtapes, it was like giving up keeping a diary. (Not that I actually kept a diary regularly.) MP3 playlists are an equivalent, I suppose, but they’re ephemeral—there’s no physical object, no homemade J-card, no permanent record of what momentarily caught your enthusiasm. If the MP3 (and the discrete, skippable CD track before it) atomized music and destroyed the ideal of the cohesive album, then the podcast may be resurrecting it. An unholy confluence of nostalgia and neophilia—to wit, the advent of free, easy-to-use audio editing software—leads me now to resurrect my mixtapes, and page through my old diaries again. These are not rips from the original tapes; these are all-digital reconstructions of the content, replete with crossfades, volume-levelling, and a few subtle tweaks. These are my old mixtapes the way I always wanted them to sound. This is the way my head sounded, once upon a time.

Another mix from the college days, assembled track by track from vinyl 45s and LPs on the old stereo in the living room of the concrete shoebox I shared with the Magazine Man (then still in the blush of his Magazine Youth).

To decipher my hen-scratch handwriting: the sidebar reads mostly current (spring/summer ’88) singles, plus album cuts, older stuff, & other miscellaneous groove thangs

Side One is subtitled The sad state of the 45, & other stuff.

Hazy Shade Of Winter – The Bangles Devil Inside – INXS It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) (edit) – R.E.M. Shooting Dirty Pool – The Replacements Freeway Jam – Jeff Beck Pump Up The Volume – M/A/R/R/S True Faith – New Order Rev It Up – Casual Gods Walk Through The Fire (Nile Rodgers remix) – Peter Gabriel No New Tale To Tell – Love And Rockets I Melt With You – Modern English

(I overused the word “stuff” then. Still do.)

The title, of course, is a goof: the People’s Voice, the People’s Choice, using the broad, dictionary definition of “popular music.” It’s funny now to look at it, twenty years on, in terms of which songs have become standards—or at least get played on the radio.

A technical note—I did some digital butchery on the REM track; the 45 single remix omitted a good portion of the first verse, presumably to tighten it up for radio play. That version does not seem to be available digitally, so I chopped it up myself.

The case of the “True Faith” 45 is even stranger; in the pressing that I have, two lines are excised from the chorus, like so:

I used to think that the day would never come I’d see delight in the shade of the morning sun My morning sun is the drug that brings me near To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear I used to think that the day would never come That my life would depend on the morning sun

…which, if possible, makes even less sense than the actual lyrics. It still baffles me why this was done (and it’s a hacky, very noticeable edit, too), but I’ve made no attempt to replicate it here.

As far as notes on the songs go: I started writing an essay for this entry and then, while searching Barbelith for something else entirely, discovered that—holy shit!—I already wrote one, three years and more ago.

Easiest Mixtape Monday ever.

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