The Mixtape Chronicles — It’s like your photo collection. (2min. 2002) Directed, shot, and edited by Lester Alfonso in San Francisco, CA for his web series on this cultural artifact.
Day 55 — With the house burning down, the cliché I’ve heard, most people grab the photo albums on their way to escape. Saving snapshots become a top priority in this instance. After all, everything else is replaceable. What matters most are your mementos. Snapshots are one of kind. They remember our forgotten moments for us. Mixtapes are like that.
Let this website challenge your concept of a museum. In House of Games, Joe Mantegna said: “Years from now, they’re gonna have to go to a museum to see a frame like this.” I tried to explain it to someone who didn’t know what a mixtape was. “It’s on cassette tape, you put on a selection of music, and then you give it to a friend.” It was reduced to a sketch. Oh yeah, she said. “We exchanged mix CDs when we were growing up but even that has disappeared.” Yeah, but mixtapes were different.
Making mixtapes became part of courting rituals at the height of its popularity. A lover could interpret each song on the mix — each lyric of every song — as the personal intention of the sender through the words of Leonard Cohen or the voice of Nina Simone.
Mixtapes have been forgotten and replaced by a playlist or maybe even just replaced by a Spotify algorithm. Making a mixtape was really an art form. (Well, myself and my friends made it an art form.) It’s a unique way of expression. It’s more than a playlist. It’s more like physically hacking the music into a magnetic ribbon while each song transitions smoothly into the next by using only hard cuts.
I once made a “concept” mixtape for a friend called Love Story composed of several three-song sets each telling the story of a relationship in a nutshell from meeting to final break-up.
Here’s a quick example:
- Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison
- I Think We’re Alone Now by Tiffany
- Nothing Compares to You by Sinèad O’Connor
There is also the art of trying to find the last song on one side of the cassette that will fit perfectly in the mood but not get cut off by running out of tape. The joy in making the mixtape was hearing how it all played out together as a cohesive “piece” on that first listen. With the new mixtapes my friends would give me, I preferred to listen in a fast-moving car. Mixtapes for road trips were the best.
More soon! —LA
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