Tale of the tape

Let us now praise the mix tape, a fuzzy-sounding byproduct of hours of misplaced energy and a pure enthusiasm for music.

By Seth Fletcher

May 28, 2005 | The stories are endless. There is the guy who in college used the same mix tape to impress three different girls -- his girlfriend, a fling and a prospective second fling -- simultaneously and got away with it. There is the 13-year-old whose musical existence was shaken out of a Sex Pistols-Beatles bipolarity by mix tapes from cooler, older friends. There is the guy who made a romantic tape called "You Best Believe I'm in Love" with nothing on it but New York Dolls songs.

In retrospect, the era of the mix tape -- which began not long after Philips unveiled the audiocassette in 1963, crescendoed throughout the '80s and probably peaked in the early '90s -- looks like a vast, unintentional folk art movement. Nearly every music-loving teenager in the country participated. Think of it this way: If every kid who spent a Saturday afternoon making a mix tape over the past 25 years had instead spent that time painting, sculpting or writing poetry, the '80s and '90s would be known as a period of unbridled renaissance in American outsider art. Now that era is over, the hours of tape-deck labor replaced by the drop-and-click production of the iPod playlist.

At least that's the sense one gets from "Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture." Edited by Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, "Mix Tape" claims to be the first book wholly devoted to mix-tape culture. "Not only is [the era of the mix tape] over, but there are so many people who don't even know what it is," Moore said in a long phone interview. "Think of people born in the '80s."

He may be right. I was last given a mix tape maybe five years ago. Every mix I've made or received since then has been on CD, which, depending on whom you ask, is either completely different or exactly the same thing.

"Mix-tape culture" is a simple but sprawling subject.

"I have so many mix-tape stories it's hard to know where to begin," writes the filmmaker Allison Anders in "Mix Tape." So do a lot of people. That's why Moore decided to make the book a relationship study rather than an academic exploration of mix-tape culture. His approach was simple. "Basically the book was me just sort of filling in my email address book, and asking everybody: Do you still have any mix tapes around?" he says.

The result is a parade of mix-tape anecdotes from 80-plus alpha hipsters -- noise rockers, punk artists, radical feminist writers, avant-garde video artists and the like. "I didn't want it to be a 'celebrities and their cats' kind of book," Moore says, "which it easily could have been. I could have gone after, like, Sofia Coppola, people that I am somewhat friendly with and who have high profiles in Hollywood. But I didn't want to go that route with it."

What do the mix tapes of the super-hip sound like? The mixes range from the arty-eclectic (Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Renaldo made a mix for his wife, the artist Leah Singer, that juxtaposes Nick Cave and Buddy Holly with dialogue from Godard's "Une Femme est une femme"), to the subversive (the album-jacket artist Pushead's tapes are -- what else? -- barrages of early '80s punk) to the ironic-redneck (Ahmet Zappa's '80s cock-rock mix comes with the following warning: "Sensitive pussies should not listen to this awesome set of ditties. This mix is filled with the power of rock and is fueled by Satan himself"). Designer Kate Spade's entry is by far the most mainstream. Like your older sister, in high school she would drive around and smoke cigarettes to a soundtrack of David Bowie's "Changes," Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" and Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence."

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