perfidy

In today's edition of Salon.com (brought to you by Jann Wenner: now with 30% more man-boob!), Joel Keller laments the death of that music-geek's model airplane, the mix tape.

I miss the way I used to make mixes. I'd sit in front of my tape deck, with a stack of CDs or records on one side of me, and a beverage (adult or otherwise) on the other, and spend a couple of hours or more finding just the right combination of songs to put on the tape. The levels would all match; loud songs got softened and soft songs got a boost. I would attempt to take the mix right to the end of the tape; I'd spend over an hour finding that perfect minute-and-a-half song or snippet that would fit musically with the rest of the mix.

All the while, I would be swigging the beverage, and listening to each song as if it was the first time I'd heard it, usually with head down and some appendage keeping time. After a side was done, I'd rewind, punch out the tab, put on a custom-made label, and go to bed knowing that I've made something that I or my friends were going to enjoy for years to come. . . . [obligatory paen to Nick Hornby/High Fidelity]

Compare the way I used to do my tape mixes with the way I do things now: I sit in front of my PC and either rip an entire CD to disk or download files from any of the legal services like iTunes or Musicmatch (in pre-litigation days, I will admit I downloaded the occasional song via Kazaa). I drag the song titles from my song list to the playlist window; I check to see if there are any abrupt endings or bad transitions, but I rarely listen to the songs all the way through. Once I'm satisfied, I pop in a CD-R, hit "record" and go to sleep. No muss, no fuss. And not nearly as much fun.

Many people who don't have the same passion for the mix as I do simply copy entire collections of MP3s to CD or onto their iPod, not caring what order the songs are in. "I can now rip or download the songs I want to MP3. Then I dump them onto one of my MP3 players. The way the process has improved for me is that I can just hit shuffle and not know what the order [of songs] is always going to be," says Jason Meurer, an engineer from New Jersey. He is one of the people who answered my e-mail queries regarding people's mixing methods. From the limited sample I received, I noticed that while a fair number of people still perform meticulous mixes, just as many play randomly from their massive MP3 collections. No one has made a mix tape in years.

As a practicing music geek with a physical cd collection that is bowing the floor of the room it's housed in, I can assure you Joel Keller is full of shit.
Let's start at the beginning: It's all well and good to invoke the hallowed name of Hornby when talking about the mix, but we need to be clear. Nick Hornby, in "High Fidelity," described a small and obsessive subculture with the same love and attention that David Halberstam gave to amateur rowing in "The Amateurs" or Jon Krakauer gave to hard-core mountain climbers in ""Into Thin Air." He never meant to universalize the experience or to claim that everyone must and should care that, for example, Stevie Ray Vaughn's "Crossfire" can't sit next to Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" in a mix because the keys the songs are in clash harmonically. It's all voluntary.

That's not to say the old days weren't great. I too have fond memories of sitting in a sea of recordings in front of a tape deck, working and reworking the running order and tweaking levels. However, doey eyed nostalgia for those days comes off the same as pining for the days before good software when you had to laboriously program your own very data-sorting functions on the Apple II ("In my day, a bubble sort took hours! And we liked it!). But we don't have to do it that way anymore unless we choose to.

Why conflate cds with just dumping music wherever it lands? Has Joel Keller never heard of Toast? Roxio Easy CD Platinum? Please! Life is better now that I can change and preview running orders on the fly. What took hours now takes... fewer hours.

Moreover, the CD is a much better avenue for a mix than the tape ever was. Despite the demise of the "side" as a concept (a damned shame), the 4 1/2'' square on the front of the cd case is a blank canvas, begging for original cover art. 80-minute cd's are easier to program than a 90-minute tape, and are not as prone to breakage under normal conditions as long tapes used to be. Hiss is reduced. Tape players are relatively rare nowadays. Finally, and I can't stress this enough, the ability to audio software to crossfade has revolutionized the art of the personal compilation.

Joel is correct that, strictly speaking, few mix tapes are made anymore, but that mere technicality is the only point he gets right. (Doesn't Salon have editors?)

The culture is still alive and well, and unkillable. If Joel Keller can't be bothered to crossfade, set levels, do a demo test-run to check the running order, edit for length, or even make sure that he hasn't put the Cure next to Joy Division (unless it's part of a whole series of mopey UK postpunk!), it's his fault. My wife hates it when I retreat into the office with an armful of cd's and an idea: it means I'll be in there for days, ordering and reordering my mix, dropping songs in and out, cutting one down to just the chorus, doing ad-hoc remixes, and trying my best to fill up 80 minutes with a mix that not only flows from one song to another but also has episodes (sides!), a thesis, and an overarching theme.

Q.E.D.

Now. When Joel says,

Many people who don't have the same passion for the mix as I do simply copy entire collections of MP3s to CD or onto their iPod, not caring what order the songs. . . . "On the subways you see people with iPods. They have, what, a thousand songs on them. Ten thousand, even. They stare random-glared into oblivion. [R]obots with shitty music taste and too much money to spend on music-listening hardware and shoes, in that order," is how Sal Tuzzeo Jr., a music writer, describes the phenomenon. Fewer people who are connected to the music they listen to translates into a less critical and picky audience for the crapola that the record companies and radio stations promote. The quality of music overall goes downhill.

Where did I first read this argument? Oh right... Allan Bloom. I bet these tools haven't even read that chapter in "The Closing of the American Mind" where Bloom pukes out endless fatuous theories about the cultural deadness and "masturbatory fantasies" of Demon Rock and Roll, ultimately concluding,

As long as [kids these days] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf."

Whatever. Any merit that Keller's lament might have is pretty much invalidated by mistakenly assuming that ooh, just everyone! gets off on music. Untrue: most people use music as a way to decorate the moment without much depth of thought. And that's fine. Pop music is meant to be enjoyed: the obsessions may be safely left to the geeks like Keller, who seems not to realize his geek nature. Sorry to break it to ya, this way, Poindexter.

I'm sorry. This article didn't really need a fisking, but it just makes me so...AAAAAUUUURGH! Go read something else, and sorry for wasting your time. I'm going to go listen to a Japanese import of a Flaming Lips concert from 1994 I bought off the internet.

[wik] Full disclosure: my wife still remembers to remind me of the unfortunate "Funkadelic" incident every time I start a mix. See, I spent three days with editing software trying to finesse a transition between Funkadelic's "(Not Just) Knee Deep" and De La Soul's "Me Myself & I," which used Funkadelic as the bedrock sample. Three days of me playing five seconds of music over and over again, tweaking the crossfade by milliseconds at a time. With no headphones. In a small apartment. I got in trouble.

Oh yeah, the mix tape isn't dead. It's just gone pro.

[alsø wik] Cross-posted in slightly different form at blogcritics.