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29 March 2024

The old tape still has some good tunes left

The advent of the iPod and the download seemed certain to consign the mix-tape to cultural oblivion but an underground cassette culture is making it flourish (GETTY IMAGES)

Published
By Tim Walker

TDK, BASF, Maxell: once, these were among the most important words in the teenage lexicon. Generations of young romantics perfected their playlists, customised their cover art, and poured heart and soul into the creation of the perfect compilation cassette tape. It might have been to impress a friend, to while away a car journey, to soundtrack a party, or to win the heart of a fair maiden.

The advent of the iPod and the download seemed certain to consign the cassette to cultural oblivion, but in music, it seems, what goes around comes around. Thanks to a growing band of online fans, the home-made tape is refusing to die.

If you know where to look, you will find cyberspace bulging with blogs debating the cult of the compilation, high-tech social networks with an old-fashioned approach to music-sharing, and nostalgic music-lovers eager to relate fond memories of their favourite mix tape.

It is such a modest thing, that little plastic cartridge with its spool of delicate magnetic tape.

Yet it can be the catalyst for a courtship, the backing track to many a sleepless night, and 90 minutes of memories that last a lifetime. Like the human relationships to which it was once the soundtrack, a mix tape can quickly and unexpectedly unravel.

The recordable cassette represents the moment music was first put in the hands of the masses. For those who could not strum a guitar, a mix tape was the ultimate expression of youthful self-obsession. And an underground cassette culture continues to flourish, courtesy of a new online coalition.

Each month, the members of the International Mix Tape Project put a home-made cassette in a Jiffy bag and send it to one of their 1,200 fellow participants, in 30 countries on six continents.

All it takes is for Ryan Goldman, the project's founder, to e-mail each member with another member's name and address and – hey presto – music-sharing the old-school way. Cassette from my Ex is a blog where writers share their mix-tape memories of past flings and stream the resulting soundtrack for every one to enjoy.

Foundtrack.com, meanwhile, uploads a monthly mix-tape of new music, and The Art of the Mix, a 10-year-old community of mix-tape lovers, is a forum for suggested tracks. Such mix-tape blogs and downloads abound. Even if your latest playlist is digital, you can store it on a USB stick in a mocked-up cassette box – also available from online stores. The tape may be technically inferior, but there are good reasons why it holds a more cherished place in music-lovers' hearts. For one thing, a well-conceived mixtape takes hours of care and attention.

Nowadays, any old Casanova can whip off six CD burns in a night for six different girls. Where does that leave the nerds of the world, who once, at least, had the advantage of elite musical knowledge and a social life barren enough to put in the time and effort required to select, compile and record the tracks for a cassette tape? Then there is the cover art. Some choose the easy path: a hastily scrawled tracklist with no frills, which plays it cool and says: "Hey, this is a tape I happened to make."

Some, on the other hand, take the honest approach: calligraphy honed to perfection with the aid of a four-colour Biro, which says: "I love you. Please love me. And if you can't,at least acknowledge my impeccable taste in music."

It is the flaws that make a mix tape unique – the song accidentally curtailed, the DJ's intro on a track recorded from radio, the felt-tip smudges on the sleeve.

You do not get that with an iPod playlist. Digital is perfect every time. Digital is dull. The Philips audio cassette arrived in Europe in 1963, and in the United States a year later, but the format had to wait 15 years to really find its feet.

In 1979, the Sony Walkman went on sale in Japan. Like the iPod, it swiftly became the ubiquitous music-player that made its format essential. Whoever designed the Walkman's first UK model must have had some understanding of the mix tape and its significance – it featured a pair of headphone jacks, allowing two people to listen at once.

That era of post-punk, during which cassette culture flourished, presaged today's music scene. It was an age of garage bands and DIY recordings, and as young fans started to copy and share each other's music collections, home taping was soon being blamed for killing music. Of course, it was doing the opposite – putting power in the hands of listeners and allowing them to feel like creators, too. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth was an early mix-tape connoisseur.

In 2004, he published Mixtape: The Art of Cassette Culture, a celebration of music sharing. "Once again," he wrote, "we're being told that home taping [in the form of ripping and burning] is killing music. But it's not: it simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music-sharing is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it."

Among the old, neglected mix-tapes now online are the NME's iconic C81 and C86 tapes from 1981 and 1986.

Both were mail-order mix-tapes produced by the weekly music newspaper in conjunction with the record label Rough Trade, compilations of the most exciting independent bands in Britain at the time. C86 included tracks by Primal Scream, The Soup Dragons and The Wedding Present.

The tape defined a generation of indie kids and became a byword for the jangly guitars and woozy melodies that were its signature sound. Britpop-era NME readers may remember the dying days of the cover mounted cassette.

In 1997, for example, Creation Records released Creation for the Nation, a mix tape featuring a then-rare Oasis demo, as well as tracks by the Super Furry Animals and Teenage Fanclub.

Mix tapes can also have mass appeal. The genres of mix tape are many and varied, though the most common is the courtship tape and its corollary, the break-up tape. There is the "tape you thought was a courtship tape until she mentioned her boyfriend" tape.

There is the walking tape, the summer tape, the dance party tape. There is the good old showing-off-your-collection tape to a new-mate tape. Driving tapes, now almost defunct owing to the lack of cassette players in new cars, had a series of sub-genres, including the road-rip tape and the commuting tape. Perhaps your favourite tape was just the one you kept in the ghetto blaster to record the best of the Top 40 each weekend, which was peppered with snippets of Mark Goodier's mid-Atlantic disc jockeying.

In his 1995 novel High Fidelity, Nick Hornby captured the inner life of the youngish, British male, a guy who defines his life by music and mix tapes. "To me, making a tape is like writing a letter," says Rob (played by John Cusack in the film adaptation).

"There's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention? and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and... oh, there are loads of rules." But Rob is a snob.

There are no rules, and that is the beauty of the thing. A tape is a piece of post-modern art, a personal expression based on appropriation. It is a way for those who cannot play an instrument to manipulate music and mood. The Rolling Stone journalist Rob Sheffield constructed Love is a Mix Tape, his memoir of love and loss, around the countless mixtapes he and his late wife once made for each other.

"The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape," he writes.

"It does a better job of storing memories than actual brain tissue can do." And the desire that drove mix-tape culture is still there.

Young people yearn to share music: they set up streamed playlists, they send CDs to each other, they exchange iPods for an evening.

It can still be a make-or-break moment for a burgeoning love affair, or the social cement that binds two new friends together. But, in a world where iTunes rules, it is nice to know that the cassette still has some good tunes left to play. (The Independent)