Mix tapes.
Do you remember mix tapes? Like when you would spent an entire afternoon making a mix tape for your friend of your favorite songs? Or when you would make a mix tape for driving, and you would listen to it every time you drove your car for the next six months?
This was a very involved process. You had to sort through your CD collection, and pick out which CD's you wanted to use, then you would have to put them in your stereo individually, go to the song you want to record, and press play on the CD and record on the tape deck at the same time. Getting the right amount of time in between songs was crucial.
You would develop this very intimate connection to the mix tape, because you listened to every song all the way through as you were recording it. And that was awesome. You were experiencing, for the first time, the feel and the personality of that tape. Whether for you or someone else, that tape meant a lot.
I think the last mix tape I made was one for Jess, when we were dating, in 2002.
Now we make playlists on iTunes. Very cool technology, but you don't know how it's going to sound until it's playing on your iPod and then you can skip through songs, or have them play randomly. And playlists can be hours long with nearly unlimited songs.
With mix tapes, you had 60, maybe 90, minutes of music, and you listened to every song all the way through, because if you tried to fast forward through a song, you might miss some of the next song, which was one that you really liked, and you'd have to rewind then.
And you loved every song on those tapes. And life was good.
8 years ago
4 comments:
yes. i loved mixed tapes. I even have one Hillary Call made me where she spent 3 hours listening to the radio so she could find and record a song from the radio that we both liked but didn't own. If that's not friendship what is. Also, we would talk in between the songs like we were dj's.
Sometimes I'm really sad that I still have this stack of mixtapes from high school and I don't even own a functioning tape deck anymore.
Yeah, I totally get it.
I remember those days. Do you remember your test-runs of the tapes, in which you would listen to the order of songs as much as was humanly possible to decide if they complimented each other?
I make Chrissy iTunes playlists as well. It makes me miss the surprise factor, though. You know, when someone is listening to the tape and they don't recognize the song and you have to tell them who the cool artist is that did the song and they're like "oh awesome" and you share a moment. I go through a lot of music trying to find songs like that for Chrissy.
Once I made one for a boyfriend.
"I love this song!" I said when it was playing. "Oh I love this song too!" after three songs with teh same exclamations he asked, "You know you made this, right?"
I had forgot.
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