Love is a Mixtape

My girlfriend and I have been dating for a while ; and this happens to be one of our anniversaries so I thought I'd tie it into music.

My girlfriend is better then me ; shes good looking, funny, smart, and has a great sense of who she is and who she wants to be. All very appealing things to a young music dork like me. So how did I lure a girl way out of my league to me? Well I gave her a mix tape.

I've always liked tapes, my mother made them as I was growing up ; when car stereos came with tape decks (although some still do). However I never really made my own until I read : Love is a Mixtape . Which is a fantastic book. So I decided to make a tape for this funky cute emo/indie/hippyesque girl. I put all sorts of gushy love songs on it ; however none so gushy to make it awkward. That's the line you have to draw ; if you're not dating then it's stupid to put on songs like "God Only Knows" it'll scare the other person away especially if they don't feel the same way. I put on the few songs that I knew she loved and I could tolerate : Then I threw on music that I thought got the message across. Long story short she ended up saying yes to me and now we make tapes all the time.

** End of Anecdote - on to mixtape science **


Tapes are cool because you can make them out of anything. You can connect a tapedeck to a computer, you could put a CD into a "CD Cassette Corder" (Aka a modern boom box), or you could be daring and make one from vinyl. Of course if you want to make a copy of "Summer 89' Mix" you could copy it in one of those duo-cassette rigs. Really they're versatile. Statistically they hold over twice as much music as a CD (some up to two hours as opposed to 74 minutes on a common CD-R). And are highly portable (pocket-sized comfortably). I guess their hay-day happened for a short time. In that weird space before CD finally took over, after vinyl. So cassettes were never really a dominant format. They lack the sound quality of either a vinyl or a CD ; however they're not really that bad. The only thing is they can deteriorate faster then any other music format. Also they're not logical because it's an analog sound unlike the digital music found on CD's which allow them to be uploaded onto programs like Windows Media Player, Winamp, or iTunes as MP3's. The tapes demise in fact was set even before the final nails were put in it's coffin. Which is sad really, considering their worth. If a song you liked came on the radio all you had to do is hit record. You could get the top 40 all in one shot ; and it was legitimate. Of course this was also true with vinyl to cassette. You could listen to the LP on your stereo, and take the tape version into the car. So in fact it's comparable to today's concept of "Buy an LP record and we'll give you the MP3 version free!" I think that tapes should still be a formative format for avid music listeners. Sure you could make a playlist ; but that's not something that you can hold in your hand. I believe in carbon dating ; only because tapes and Cd's are made of carbon. You can see where you were, who you dug, and get right back into that mindset by only pressing play. So go home, make a playlist, burn a CD, and make a tape. I promise you, you'll be happy that you did.


- Peace and Love -