My Secchi Disk

My Saturday morning bed-reading today consisted of the mix tape book Todd gave me. It wasn’t so much the extolling of mix tape culture in the book that got me, but the reproductions of hand-made cover art and song lists. I got out of bed and actually saw my cassette collection sitting on my desk, for the first time in months. I’ve been on the CD-and-online music wagon for two years now, and I think it’s time to reconsider.

I must mention that I am listening to Rock #50 as I write this. When I was in about second grade I started recording my favorite songs off Philadelphia’s top 40 stations onto old psych lecture tapes that my dad gave me. These were normal bias, 60 min, and often the lecture breaks through in spots. I called the first tape Rock #1, and the very first song on it happens to be “We Built This City on Rock and Roll”… how perfect is that? I kept it up, with a few hiatuses, eventually switching to CrO2 and 90 min, switching to local stations, and writing down track listings (often of my own rendition of the song’s title) so I don’t record the same song 5 times.

This brings me to the most important difference between getting your music from the radio and getting it from the internet or from reading about music. I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHO SINGS “We Built This City”. I know it’s famous, and everyone else probably knows the name of the band, but I don’t, and I don’t care. I can probably sing it better than you can anyway. Maybe some would argue that I’m not respecting the artist or the art form by not caring, but for me music is simply about listening, nothing else is required.

When I got a computer with a CD-burner in fall 2004, things changed. I learned to find full albums online of songs that I had heard on the radio. This was good in a way, but now I’m not sure it’s worth it. It changes the way I listen to the radio. The individual song is only a vehicle to finding the album. When I do find the album, of course the DJ has picked the best song off it, and often the rest isn’t worth listening to. And I hate listening to music on my computer, and don’t want to waste CDs by burning an album before I’m sure I like it, so most of the music just sits there trapped in the computer anyways.

The other change that came with the computer was the ability to make mix CDs. I found it was quite a different experience. The ability to quickly line up songs in different orders raised the art form, in a way, because it wasn’t just about track selection and lyrical flow, but meshing the melody and dynamics of the end of one track with the beginning of the next became really important. Hours were spent switching song order. This is something I didn’t worry about too much on mix tapes. First songs and final songs, As and Bs, took thought, but a lot of the middle was just songs I liked. Maybe a true mix tape artist can do all the arranging of tracks in her head. Also, all the weird music Amy and others gave me on tape, like Bratcha Bana (Celtic?), couldn’t be included on mixes anymore.

I think part of why I, and probably other tape-lovers, switched to mix CDs is that they’re a.) easily reproducible, to share with more than one person, and b.) more permanent, as they don’t disintegrate like cassettes do. But are both of these things we want? Mixes are a very personal art form, and it’s rare for me to give the same mix to more than one person, even if it’s just a question of popping a CD in the burner. And the striving for permanence… nothing really needs to be said about that.

I miss my mix tapes. These contain music that I just never listen to anymore, not because I don’t have the equipment, just because I’m in the habit of listening to CDs, so that’s the collection I look through when I want something to listen to. So, in celebration of this revelation, I’m going to finally finish the last mix tape I started, in 2004 in Ann Arbor. It’s called Best of Minnesota College Radio, and it’s for Amy.