Armed with stacks of clean CDs and the original outlaw Napster , I spent my college years giving and encounter mixes . As a member of the post - mixtape pre - playlist generation , I ’d like to say a word in defense of the mix CD .
Everyone has a write up about some favorite mixtape they had . Books have been devote to elegiac tales of romance spooled ontoMaxell cassettes — there are countless chronicle in this universe about how each tape told tales of moondances and Lucy in the sky or colored girls who pass doo - dee - doo - dee - doo . They were decorated with Lisa Frank dagger or drawings of Debbie Harry ; the song were grouped in themes , or started out slow and then picked up the beat , or they were about love without ever actually mentioning the Scripture “ love . ” Was n’t it so cute the way you had to use a pencil to curve the tapeline whenever it got tangled ? Or you used Scotch whiskey tape to fix a break . You have that history , do n’t you . Well , chouse you . I ’m sitting over here with an old compilation candela , and he ’s about had it with all the cassette adulation .
The year 2000 was a low full point for mixtapes . Today cassette have become a kind of pop - nontextual matter symbol . You ca n’t throw a Edward Durell Stone on Etsy without finding atape - pep up iPhone cozyorringorsoap . Earlier in the decade , however , cassettes just seemed old and whacky . Why oh why would you need to make a mix magnetic tape when you could conform to so many more song on a candela ? What ’s more , you could tote up song using Napster .
Oh , Napster . My boyfriend found 30 versions of “ Happy Birthday , ” burn them onto a disc and gave them to me when I turned 20 . He had fling and bought a reckoner that could burn off discs . I then listened to them using the certificate of deposit player in my PC ! I had a stereoscopic picture , but order it in the computer made it palpate spare limited . The multi - functionality of it all ! What could maybe happen next ? The coffee maker would probably start making cereal .
Today , we expect that each of our gadgets can purloin strike for every other contrivance , but back then this form of versatility actually meant something . Oh , what is that you ’re enounce , mix CD ? If you broke , you could be interchange unlike your cassette brethren ? And you could transport how many song ? And no one had to constantly jump up to press “ stop ” on the wireless when a strain ended . You did n’t even need to use Napster — you could rend your own CDs to MP3s and then put hundreds songs on a single disc . Hallelujah .
In 2000 , my champion Daisy made me a mix cadmium . She was next-to-last at Mount Holyoke . It was mostly filled with Indigo Girls songs , but still . She ’s not the most technologically savvy somebody in the humans , so I was impressed . Not only had she curated a set of several twelve songs , but she actually went to the computer science lab ! Just for me . Now that ’s friendly relationship .
My old cassettes are caked with rubble on a shelf in a closet . And the premix candle , you enquire ? The euphony is in my iPod and the disc itself ? It ’s the right way here under my coffee mug , working to keep my tabletop unmutilated . Like I said : it ’s all about the multi - functionality .
Top CC shot fromsmohundro on Flickr
iPodY2k10
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