on mixtapes
For the purpose of writing this, I listened to a Spotify playlist I hadn’t revisited in more than four years. My fourteen-year-old self didn’t know a more dramatic way to confess to the first actual crush I ever had, so she made a themed playlist and sent it to him one night. That was around the time I started making mixtapes. I now look back half nostalgic, half embarrassed that I strived so badly to be the archetype of the 2014 Tumblr girl. Nonetheless, besides the fact that one does not need to call a love song playlist “this is everything i didn’t say” and put the White Stripes, Nirvana, Florence + The Machine and Guns ‘n’ Roses on it, I do still stand by the CDs I used to burn to play in my dad’s car on our way to high school. I did make a CD out of my love declaration, but I never gave it to my crush - sending him the link to my Spotify was easier and quicker, and more spontaneous, which made the text conversation we were having so much better (although we never ended in a relationship). This, for a 2014 story, says a lot about the evolution of themed mixtapes throughout the years.
An old, cringey (though not the cringiest) playlist I once made for my crush at the time.
I’m not sure what got me into making mixtapes. I think it partly was the fact I discovered lots of new music around the time I was thirteen and fourteen, and I wanted to listen to it in the car (to the dismay of my father and brother, who had to share the car ride with me); Perks of Being a Wallflower also played a big role - I wanted to have those mixes from the book in my real life; but what was crucial to my experience of playlists in my early teenage years was a website called 8tracks.
8tracks was a cross between the freedom and immediacy of streaming services like Spotify and Soundcloud, and the more old-fashioned CDs and cassettes. It allowed for users to upload a minimum of eight songs to an “online mixtape”, then create cover art for it, add annotations to tracks, choose a name for the playlist and upload it to the website community. Users had a limited number of tracks they could skip, making it more similar to the functioning of a cassette, but translated for a contemporary audience. 8tracks playlists were more carefully-curated than their Spotify counterparts, they had more interesting concepts and, more importantly, tons of user-created annotations on why they had chosen this or that song and what it meant in the context of the mix.
The service and the community around it sort of fizzled out in 2016, after 8tracks stopped offering streaming outside of the United States and Canada, meaning international users had to listen to the songs through embedded YouTube videos. There have been attempts to revive this way of listening to music, like Playmoss, but to this day, I haven’t found anything with a similar community.
But it’s okay. The need to create playlists inspired by moments, emotions, people, things I read, places or stories I hear was already in me. I think there’s something really powerful in a collection of songs that, listened to in order, tell a narrative arc, or even in a playlist where every song has a reason to be there beyond the simple “well, I like to listen to upbeat music when I clean my kitchen, hence my ‘Songs to Clean To’ list”. It’s a more ambiguous way of saying things, and even though I wouldn’t recommend using it to confess your love to anyone for risk of misinterpretation (be direct, come on!), it’s incredible how songs can change depending on what you listen to right after, and how many different interpretations people can come up with.
Playlists have the power to say way more than a single song or an album will ever say. Like a jukebox musical, they pull words from other artists to say brand new words from the person that is making it, and they demand time and care. For someone that is not very good with words, like me, playlists can be way more intimate and say much more than I could ever say, so it is a big deal for me to make someone a playlist. This is something we could argue is not as common as it used to, but it didn’t disappear when cassettes did: it just transformed.
It’s more similar to the vinyl revival, for example. Vinyl is not a niche thing anymore, and while mixtapes and playlists might have disappeared for a few years while the world transitioned from analog technology to digital networks, they’ve come back, as more than just a nostalgic throwback. The platforms obviously change with time: barely anyone has the resources to record and play a cassette mixtape, and CDs are increasingly being phased out, although there’s always ways of recording them, but there will always be nerds that want to put together a bunch of songs to send to someone that matters to them, or to cheer themselves up right before a difficult exam. Spotify and Apple Music are probably what most people turn to nowadays, but there’s also services like Stayed Up All Night that still draw upon the whole cassette imagery. And sometimes you just have to write it down and let them play the music themselves, track by track. And that’s okay too. Platforms to create playlists might be evolving and changing, but the sentiment is still the same.
The feeling of being in a movie that’s made just for you, of having your heart explode as you hear the crescendo right as the breeze turns into strong wind that lashes your hair, of being gigantic yet small in a world that never sleeps… all these feelings can be so heightened by a good playlist that acts as soundtrack. The actress and singer Evan Rachel Wood already discussed this in what is probably one of my favourite articles ever, The Art of the Playlist (https://nylon.com/articles/the-art-of-the-playlist), but it really is true. We turn to mixtapes with specific themes to invoke feelings that are truly beyond ourselves, to take us back to that particular evening, to help us get through obstacles… and that’s something that, independently of what form it is presented in, I don’t see changing any time soon.
