Mixed Tape

Yesterday I left my home without my phone. Since I was driving my kids to school and there is such a thing as a bell time and a bus that can’t be missed, I didn’t go back to get it. It’s not that I thought I would miss any important call, it’s that I KNEW I would miss my music. As I was driving and craving ma tunes, I eyed the car stereo. I’ve had my car for 10 years and back when I purchased my car, music and how we consume it was changing. Though it has a multi-CD disc player in it, it also has an area where you can upload your CD’s and keep them in your car digitally. I think there are 20 music slots. I say “think” because it’s been so long since I’ve ever uploaded music, I’d probably have to dig out my car’s user manual in order to do it. 

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without” – Confucius

Confucius gets it. 

I pressed my rarely used CD button and some other random buttons, finally navigating to the list of CD’s that I had to choose from. Great, many of them were “unnamed” occupied slots. Technology back then couldn’t deal with my burned “mixtapes”, no metadata there. It truly had been a long time since I used any of these car functions to listen to my music. Those unnamed used music slots: the last of my “old school” mixtapes. 

It’s moments like this that I realize that I’m THAT age…. What age? The “Kids these days just don’t understand” age. I think GenX is an interesting generation to be from. We were young enough to live through records/8-tracks/cassettes/digital-purchases, and streaming services.  We perfected mixtapes, because I’m not sure there was a version of mixed anything before a cassette. Though I suppose there were record players that could have a lineup of 7” vinyls. Hardly portable…. A true mixed tape is portable. GenX though, we definitely had our music on the go. We lived through the tangled tape in our overly used cassettes AND then scratched CD’s. We lived through having to purchase a whole album, just to get that one song…. I mean, unless you were like me and didn’t have the funds (nor the parents’ permission) and had to be patient enough to sit in wait, in front of your radio. And if you weren’t patient enough, well… if you wanted the song, you sat anyway. God bless the DJ who didn’t speak over the first few seconds of a song. 

GenX also knows what it means to commit to an artist. Okay, to be fair, those Boomers who had to purchase a whole record or 8-track, yeah… fine, they also know. You suddenly have a whole album from one artist (I mean, unless it was a compilation. Did Boomers have compilations??) 

By the time I turned 18 and moved away from my parents, Columbia Records was a thing. A HUGE thing for me. A thing that todays youth just wont understand, because it’s a foreign concept to them… much like a rotary phone. Columbia Records Club – – A golden ticket that bought me a new sound to close my eyes and sink into. Of course, it wasn’t an actual ticket, as it was many dozen lick and stick stamps to sort and pick from. At the time that time in my life I was living in a small town, had been home schooled, and if that isn’t enough to keep me untethered from any music lifeline, I had been raised highly religious to boot.  My music knowledge was based off of my parents’ blasts from the past and our local small town radio station. The town basically had AM radio, oldies, country, and a top 40 station. 

Back in those days, my music was picked and purchased more often than not, by how connected to an album cover. There may have been some eenie meenie miney moe involved. Or a lot of eenie meenie miney moe involved. The thing is, with my limited funds, lack of knowledge, and impulsive musical selection roulette, I suppose it’s not surprising to hear that there were instances that I would purchase something and there wasn’t an instant love of the sound, but instead an instant letdown. However, also due to my limited funds and lack of selection, I’d always revisit the cast aside albums. Even when I got around more and heard more artists, there was still that commitment to a purchase. I would purchase an album based on a top 40 song hit, only to find that I wasn’t fond of any of the artist’s/bands other songs. This continued through my 20’s and into my 30’s. For those who knew me during my Dave Matthews years, it might surprise them to know that I didn’t actually liiiiiike the first DMB CD I purchased. And then, after revisiting, I couldn’t stop listening. 

Myself and the rest of GenX got to experience mixed tapes from using a dual cassette player, which evolved into all the various other methods that required an actual hard copy of music to start with, before using computers, uploads, blank CD’s, and burning onto those blank CD’s. Also, we got to experience the introduction to digital downloads, that could be burned, instead of off of an actual artist CD. Suddenly, you didn’t have to commit to a whole album to purchase, instead you could pick and choose from single songs. 

My oldest daughter, who is 30, knows about Cassettes and CD’s. However, with my 9 & 10 year old, besides the compilations I purchased for them when they were infants and toddlers, they will never ask me to purchase them a CD. Instead, they ask me to add a song to their Spotify playlists that I keep on my Spotify account. They will never know the annoyance of jogging with a Discman. They will never know the feeling of going on a road trip and needing to change the 8-track/cassette/Cd or the joy it felt when car stereos allowed for multiple CD’s being loaded and used at the same time. They will never know how you had to perfect that song list before recording or burning it. Once a mix was complete, back in the day, it wasn’t an easy task to just delete a song or rearrange a playlist.

All of the above being said….. I have never been more immersed in music than I am now. Me and my Spotify are inseparable. My Spotify playlists were my lifeline during Covid. During social isolation, it was my playlists that kept me company. 

The way I listen to music now is so different from how I listened to music when I was younger. Even though I no longer live in a small town and have (no doubt) a ton of radio stations to choose from, I rarely listen to the radio. I play Spotify and it listens, learns, and suggests. And while there is nostalgia for the past…. I so love the way I can now consume new music. I love the exposure to songs/artists that result from some sort of algorithm that gets me, really truly gets me…. and produces better than any of my ennie meenie miney moe ways. 

Still, kids these days, they just don’t understand the effort that used to go into a mixed tape. They can never know how truly extra special those mixes were, due to all of the added effort we put into them.