The Mix Tape Is Dead

long live the "mix CD".

annoyed? so am i. i was a mix tape FREAK in college and shortly thereafter. one of the 1,432 ways i directly, intimately relate to High Fidelity. even the name, "mix tape", sounds more melodious than "mix CD". just sorta irks me. the one benefit i can see out of a mix CD is that you're no longer shackled to the contents of your own collection when making a tape for that special someone (assuming they're special...i can't imagine going through the effort, even the paltry effort of a CD, for someone who doesn't truly matter to you)...thanks to those Napster-wannabes, all you need a decent connection and a basic lack of morality and boom, any song you can think of, you can get (and usually get the German version to boot).

i got my first mix CD senior year of college (Fall, 1997 for those of you playing at home). it was a total novelty. i think our campus had one burner which costs roughly $18,000 and burned at 6k/sec. anyways, that was a totally sweet gesture, which involved this girl schlepping about 20 CDs across campus to make this for me. now, assuming you've bought a computer in the last 18 months, you've got a burner already, and been augmenting your CD collection quite nicely.

of course, yours truly has a slightly more ancient computer, which gives me a dirty look every time i try to run more than 3 or 4 apps at once. it gives me this, "oh bugger, do i REALLY have to run Snood?" (apparantly my computer is also British. go figure.)

a mix tape took TIME. hours upon hours of song selection, ordering, re-ordering, factoring in time constraints, giving yourself that self-high five when the last song of side 1 ended 3 seconds before the tape did, jumping around and singing "i'm free" at the top of your lungs.

ok, well maybe only i did that. why are you looking at me that way?

also, there was storytelling involved. you could take the listener on two separate journeys, each with its own particular peaks and canyons, surprises and motifs, complementary but independent. with a CD, you've pretty much got your one storyline, which makes really good segues really tough to come by.

but since i didn't have much else to do tonite, and since the apartment is about as clean as i can stand it (which means the health board won't automatically condemn it if they peek in), i thought i'd give a CD mix a try. not to burn, since i am one computer away from being able to do that, but more of an intellectual exercise.

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