Is the audiocassette dead?
One of my favorite things to do as a grade schooler was create mixtapes of songs off the radio. You had yourself a boombox and if you were super lucky, Tonight, Tonight by The Smashing Pumpkins would come on the air with a minimum of the stupid deejay talking through the intro. The boombox had to have a record feature which let you record whatever was playing. One thing I was sloppy about was that I didn't know when the end of the tape would hit, and I would only wind up with half of "I kissed a girl"- No, not the Katy Perry one, the Jill Sobule one.
I remember mixtapes I made for friends, taking care to create the cleverest titles and most glittery cover art possible. These tapes were for those I truly cared for because you often had to wait hours before getting "Epic".
Later on in high school there was the mixtape's cousin- The mix CD. This was made possible by fancy things called computers that let you download music. My boyfriend at the time, Nathan made me 3 of them and I still have them. As my musical tastes grew beyond KRock and Z100 friends would laugh at me for putting Queen and Backstreet Boys on the same album.
I think Itunes killed the mixtape. Sure you can probably e mail someone a bunch of MP3s, but that simply does not have the charm of cracking open a case and putting a tape in your Walkman.
I absolutely love the books Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List. Yes, it is young adult fiction, but they both give me hope that mixtapes are not dead yet, as they figure prominently in both stories.
Perhaps when the hipsters are done with vinyl they can make cassettes cool again?
One of my favorite things to do as a grade schooler was create mixtapes of songs off the radio. You had yourself a boombox and if you were super lucky, Tonight, Tonight by The Smashing Pumpkins would come on the air with a minimum of the stupid deejay talking through the intro. The boombox had to have a record feature which let you record whatever was playing. One thing I was sloppy about was that I didn't know when the end of the tape would hit, and I would only wind up with half of "I kissed a girl"- No, not the Katy Perry one, the Jill Sobule one.
I remember mixtapes I made for friends, taking care to create the cleverest titles and most glittery cover art possible. These tapes were for those I truly cared for because you often had to wait hours before getting "Epic".
Later on in high school there was the mixtape's cousin- The mix CD. This was made possible by fancy things called computers that let you download music. My boyfriend at the time, Nathan made me 3 of them and I still have them. As my musical tastes grew beyond KRock and Z100 friends would laugh at me for putting Queen and Backstreet Boys on the same album.
I think Itunes killed the mixtape. Sure you can probably e mail someone a bunch of MP3s, but that simply does not have the charm of cracking open a case and putting a tape in your Walkman.
I absolutely love the books Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List. Yes, it is young adult fiction, but they both give me hope that mixtapes are not dead yet, as they figure prominently in both stories.
Perhaps when the hipsters are done with vinyl they can make cassettes cool again?
