Tale of the tape

But does format really matter? Some say a digital mix isn't as special because it doesn't carry the weight of hours of labor that a well-done mix cassette does. With a laptop, there's no mapping out the ebb and flow of your song list to make sure you don't run out of tape in the middle of the last song. Digital technology, detractors say, is too slick, too easy. But even Moore, a self-professed cassette junkie who still uses cheap tape decks onstage, admits that the mix CD is an acceptable successor.

"Maybe it doesn't take the same amount of physical effort," he says, "but that's not the point. I think it takes the same amount of psychological effort, or romantic effort." Indeed, the true challenge of the mix tape -- selecting the right music and arranging it in a thoughtful manner -- is at least as tricky and probably even more difficult with a laptop and CD burner as it was with a boom box. In both cases, the mix is governed by the same compositional considerations: You need a narrative structure, an internal logic, a strong opening, an appropriate and preferably surprising ending.

The challenge these days is that with a world of file sharing at your fingertips, the choices are endless. Time was you only had your own record collection to choose from when making a mix tape. Now you have millions of people's MP3 collections -- truly millions, possibly billions, of songs to choose from, not to mention snippets from movies, jingles, bits of famous speeches or bits of "dialogue" from the Paris Hilton video. It can all be a bit paralyzing. In the age of file-sharing communities such as Soulseek, making a mix CD is like trying to make a professional-grade audio collage -- your own personal Beck album.

All this raises the question: Is the mix tape really an art form? Literary critic Matias Viegener, writing in "Mix Tape," offers the most convincing case that it is. "The mix tape is a list of quotations, a poetic form, in fact: The cento is a poem made up of lines pulled from other poems," he argues. There are differences, of course. You can't perform a formalist analysis on a mix tape; unlike with, say, a poem, not every word is there intentionally. In fact, one of the most vexing problems the mix maker faces is that rarely does an entire song express what you're trying to say; most often you choose a song because of one particular element -- a chorus, a verse or a mood -- but another part of the song often betrays you. Still, the mix taper faces the same choices as the writer: what to include, what to exclude, where to start, where to end, what to emphasize and what to hide between the lines.

Besides, for a large part of an entire generation, a good mix tape carries more emotion and potential for transport than any book, film or individual song. People never tire of mix tapes. They keep them until they lose them; they never throw them out. Instead, they wear them out or spill bong water all over them and still refuse to get rid of them, despite the urgings of girlfriends, boyfriends, fiancées, wives and husbands. No matter what kind of satellite-linked, GPS-enabled iPod mutation kids of the future will carry, a good number of them will still grow up and fall in and out of love to the sound of the mix, however it's delivered.

But clearly there is something special about the mix tape, a physicality that digital technology can't replicate, something significant enough that Moore was able to fill a book just by e-mailing everyone in his Rolodex. The difference between analog and digital mixes isn't as dramatic as cassette junkies would argue. But the difference is real enough that when someone puts together "Playlist: The Art of iPod Culture," those of us who came of age in the '80s and '90s probably won't be reading.

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