Tale of the tape

All these tapes, whether compilations of avant-punk or classic rock standards, have a common purpose: to communicate an emotion or idea -- to a new friend, a potential lover, or even to oneself. The mix tape, Moore says, is "sort of a safe-sex thing: It's sharing music instead of sharing germs." The romance comes not only from the emotion expressed by a series of songs, but also from the sheer effort that it takes to plan and execute a mix. "The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient," writes Dean Wareham of Luna. "It might be a desire to go to bed, or to share ideas. The message of the tape might be: I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you. Or, maybe: I love me. I am a tasteful person who listens to tasty things. This tape tells you all about me."

"Mix tapes are like matchmaker forms," Moore writes. For budding couples they can test compatibility. Welcome to my world, the mix tape says. If you end up sleeping over on a regular basis, this is the music you'll have to listen to. Why don't you make me a tape, too, so I know you're not into Simply Red? Phrased negatively, making a mix tape for someone other than your girlfriend is a form of cheating. In the film version of Nick Hornby's book "High Fidelity," probably the mix tape's cultural zenith, John Cusack's character, Rob Gordon, nearly wrecks a relationship by making a mix for another girl. He might as well have been caught with panties in his messenger bag. It doesn't matter that he never gets further than flirting. Making a mix tape for another girl is only a notch below actual infidelity.

For rock snobs like the fictional Rob Gordon and record-store geeks everywhere, the mix tape has an additional purpose: to brainwash someone, to alter their musical taste. Like most people, I would imagine, I got my biggest share of these in college, when I had indie-rocker friends with enough spare time to make me grungy compilations of abrasive screamo, the covers scrawled with obscure, vulgar band names and bizarre symbols. I was brainwashed into an affection for Robyn Hitchcock by an indoctrination tape that my friends and I repeatedly stole from one another over the years, a tape I still have in my desk drawer.

In a way, "Mix Tape" is a book-length elegy that rests on the idea that the mix tape can exist only on the black-and-gold Maxell. The mix CD, now standard fare at wedding receptions and in my Brooklyn neighborhood's hipper jukeboxes, doesn't have the same allure. "In the future, when social scientists study the mix tape phenomenon, they will conclude -- in fancy language -- that the mix tape was a form of 'speech' particular to the late 20th century, soon replaced by the 'play list,'" writes Dean Wareham. That the book was published at all argues that the era of the mix tape is over. If it weren't, then why put out a book about it?

This kind of cassette fetishism is part nostalgia and part technical snobbery. For Moore, only analog tape can please what he calls the "ear-heart." Digital technology "doesn't have the physicality of analog tape -- the friction on the head like that," he says.

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