Mixtape Culture

Send us a photo of your mixtape cassette. Tell us about it.

Mixtapes as social media

Great blog post from Dan Slee - 
MY C90: Mixtapes are the original social media

Posted May 31, 2010
// 1 Comment

John Peel is my co-pilot

People tend to think of mixtapes as gifts to others, or that's the cliche at least. Here are some songs I put together on a tape because 1) they're themed in a particular way that mean something to you, 2) they are bands / music you'll like or (often the case) 3) this is music I think you should like or I can at least impress you with. When I started making tapes of John Peel shows, I made them for myself - if anything, I was trying to impress myself with my eclectic, oddball tastes.

Any time I remembered I'd record a whole John Peel evening show - this was when he had a 2 hour slot, I think from 10-12 weekdays. Actually that seems insane now, that something as MOR as Radio 1 seems now would allow Peel to play such a range of music during weekdays like that. I guess the closest we have to that now is Radio 3's Late Junction, although it's a bit more 'world-y' than Peel. 

So I'd record a whole show, leaving my tape deck to record onto one side then auto flip pover and record onto the other side. If there was a particular session on that show and I needed to be up to change tapes, I'd stay awake, otherwise I could sleep through my radio recording that. Then over the next few days I'd go through the tapes and tape-to-tape put it into a mixtape - although I never really thought of them as mixtapes. 

The general idea was to keep the songs in order, and try not to feel the urge to edit too many of the songs out. If it was something I knew I wouldn't like, it didn't go in, but I'd like to think i was pretty open-minded and would allow things to 'grow on me'. I remember fast-forwarding  through what I always thought of as 'widdly', instrumental African guitar music but would probably now be more open to listen to. I usually edited out Peel's banter, which kind of feels like a bad idea now, but would often leave in Peel's intro our outro dialogue, often as it would run over the records anyway - giving rise to the catchphrase I still have with one of my friends, always delivered in a Peel accent : 'This is Polvo.' The nature of listening to Peel's intros to get the band names and titles also led to a few amusing notations on my 'inlay cards' e.g. the band Pet Lamb misheard as Pettle Am. 

Over a few years I recorded around 22 tapes, and I'm pretty sure still have them all, dotted around. I'd give each one a title including the words John Peel, hence 'John Peel is my co-pilot' (named after a band he often played, 'God is my co-pilot')and another I remember, 'John Peel announces the death of a god' (a semi ironic name for the tape including Peel's delivery to me of news that Kurt Cobain had killed himself). The nature of it led to some interesting discoveries. Through Jon Peel's show I first heard / heard of Pavement, Jacob's Mouse, The Fall, Fly Ashtray, Tsunami and many others. Most of those I still listen to to this day - in fact there's a Tsunami CD in my Mac as we speak. 

Posted May 26, 2010
// 0 Comments

Twitter Round Up - up to 31st October 2009

We mentioned the project on Twtter this week. Amongst the pledges to add a tape, we captured a number of comments about mix tapes. In the spirit of the project, and as some tweets were protected, these are represented here as anonymous:

I think we threw all our mixtapes out with the cassette player a few years ago!

I've still got tapes of the top 40 I recorded *cough* years ago. The days before children had disposable incomes.

I used to make mixtapes (of the unmixed variety) for [my partner] when we were 16. Used C15 computer tapes with ~5 songs.

I put a whole box of tapes up in the loft the other weekend. Time to get them back down again...

The making of "mixtapes" was my shy teenage proxy for flirting in the early 90s.

did you really say 'mixtape'? Does Nick Hornby use it? Only time I ever saw/heard it growing up was on mixed DJ tapes.

on further research it seems mixtape is a US term for compilation. Never heard that use until recently now it's become trendy.

See more posts about    Tweets  
Posted October 31, 2009
// 0 Comments

Hornby on the art of the Mixtape

Whenever I think of Mixtapes, I think of this passage from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity:

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules.

See more posts about    Rules  
Posted October 29, 2009
// 1 Comment

Mixtapes waiting to happen

A box of blank tapes. These are the raw materials for the beginnings of a great mixtape set. Just add obscure 60s country music, bad 80s ballads, unrequited love, musical snobbery, treasured memories, roadtrips and late night radio shows, as desired.

See more posts about    Blank Tapes  
Posted October 29, 2009
// 0 Comments