Mixtape Culture

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

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
// 2 Comments

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