IPods killed the mixed tape

Sheldon Boucher — The Brunswickan (University of New Brunswick)

FREDERICTON (CUP) — Remember those dismal days back when you could be mobile with only one CD at a time? If you were unlucky, your player didn’t even have anti-skip. Or think back even farther into the annals of history when cassettes were in vogue.

If you are like me, the thought of not having an omnipresent library of music organized to your tastes should be troublesome. We listen to a lot of music. It is as important to us as it has ever been and we get cranky when we can’t update our iPods. But mixed tapes are no longer part of our musical dialogue.

Back when Charlie Sheen was still acting in movies, if you wanted a compilation, you had to record onto a cassette. Shuffling through records, taking time to transfer the songs to cassette and writing out all the track names by hand could be a painstaking and time-consuming process. But it was something that was done unabashedly by hopeful romantics.

To your girlfriend, that effort was obvious — and it was always for a girl, wasn't it? Simply by virtue of handing that tape over to your significant other, you let her know that you spent at least a few hours thinking of her. If you were going to go through the trouble of transferring music onto a tape, you were going to do it well.

Some of that compiling magic was retained when we started burning CDs. But once it was possible to rip all your music onto your computer, making a CD was only a matter of clicking, dragging and dropping. The process became vacuous, and our girlfriends suffered.

As recordable CDs became cheap ubiquitous items, we became sloppy absent-minded drones, at least with our capacity to put together a thoughtful list of songs. We did not (and do not) need to feverishly rifle through music seeking perfection when we could make a CD every 10 minutes, and throw them away just as fast.

In the age of Apple, we have managed to squeeze out the mixed CD’s last gasp of air. By relying on MP3 players more and more, we have begun to distance ourselves from the album form. For most of us, when we buy an album it gets ripped into iTunes and transferred onto our iPods. This is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, but we are also making the album form less and less familiar to us. The iPod has even taken care of our need for CD players in vehicles.

We are now so unfamiliar with the process of making a compilation that the mere idea of doing it makes us uncomfortable. We have romanticized them to such outrageous proportions that it has become impossible for us to use them as a real source of romance. Once we romanticize something as culturally incendiary as the mixed tape, we can no longer accept it as normal relationship behaviour. It becomes laughable.

Except in John Cusack movies about lists, the mixed tape is an art lost to the netherworld. We are able to shuffle through music libraries so rapidly on our iPods that the process of making a compilation, even for ourselves, becomes impractical. Yes, our desire for convenience and practicality has eclipsed our romantic intuitions.

Many people reading this have probably made mixed tapes for their girlfriends or boyfriends, and I apologize if this reads like an attack on your efforts. I am not able to claim any expertise in this category myself. But next time your relationship goes sour and you need something to blame, point your finger at the auspicious iPod. But don’t forget to update it first.

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