In a fast-changing world, the mixtape unites generations. Even if they exist less on actual tape—though the medium has made a modest comeback—the concept has proved enduring for going on five decades. Today we're as deep in mixtape culture as we were in the glory days of the 1980s.
So what is a mixtape now? Unlike a playlist, which can be changed on a whim, a mixtape is still a fixed number of songs running an hour or two, whether it's a .zip file, streamed, or cut the old fashioned way. The mix suggests a degree of care, some emotional labor, and a frisson of underground cool. In an era where anyone can listen to almost anything on demand, the mixtape feels special; when we feel siloed by Spotify's algorithms, they retain a human touch.
The art of the personal mixtape, perfected by young paramours, has definitely taken a hit, but they serve a more important commercial purpose than ever. Hip-hop, in particular, has maintained their aura—fitting, since they were born at the same time. Obscure rappers can break out with one, while the most famous can use them to maintain their cool—either way, the form is anything but nostalgic.
 MixtapesFebruary 15, 2019 |
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In a fast-changing world, the mixtape unites generations. Even if they exist less on actual tape—though the medium has made a modest comeback—the concept has proved enduring for going on five decades. Today we're as deep in mixtape culture as we were in the glory days of the 1980s.
So what is a mixtape now? Unlike a playlist, which can be changed on a whim, a mixtape is still a fixed number of songs running an hour or two, whether it's a .zip file, streamed, or cut the old fashioned way. The mix suggests a degree of care, some emotional labor, and a frisson of underground cool. In an era where anyone can listen to almost anything on demand, the mixtape feels special; when we feel siloed by Spotify's algorithms, they retain a human touch.
The art of the personal mixtape, perfected by young paramours, has definitely taken a hit, but they serve a more important commercial purpose than ever. Hip-hop, in particular, has maintained their aura—fitting, since they were born at the same time. Obscure rappers can break out with one, while the most famous can use them to maintain their cool—either way, the form is anything but nostalgic.
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1,000: Bootleg copies of Chance the Rapper's breakthrough Acid Rap mixtape sold in the months after its release
#63: Billboard chart position those bootleg sales gave the album in 2013
4: Mixtapes put out by Kendrick Lamar before his first studio album
81: Mixtapes put out by 50 Cent's G-Unit crew in 12 years
$0.01/min: Tax on blank tapes proposed by RIAA-backed US legislation in 1985 to counter pirated music
$1/min: Amount Grandmaster Flash charged for recordings of his live mixes
16: D batteries it took to power the boombox in Sonic Youth's mid-80s tour van
$0.20: Cost to manufacture a cassette in 2010
Making the mix
Before you make a mixtape, you need a cassette tape. Or do you? Perhaps the first mixtape was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, a three-LP set from 1952 that featured songs commercially released from 1927 to 1932. Smith curated and annotated the 84 songs to illustrate his own idiosyncratic notion of folk; as Geoffrey O'Brien writes in Records Ruin the Landscape, "designed to be heard precisely in the order laid down, it anticipated the sort of musical collage that would become perhaps the most widely practiced American art form: the personal mix tape of favorite songs."
But making records is hard. It was the cassette, first arriving in 1963, that would be a great equalizer. By 1968, cars were coming with cassette players, and in 1970 the medium's achilles heel, hiss, was vastly improved by the advent of Dolby noise reduction. When the even more personal Walkman debuted in 1979, the cassette tape flourished.
And it did so alongside hip-hop. The genre's first true hit, Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," was released the same year. But before it broke through to the mainstream, hip-hop artists made money and fans with mixtapes recorded from live sets. Grandmaster Flash told MTV that he made a couple thousand dollars a month selling them. Gypsy-cab drivers got them for free to play while making the rounds, a hack to get rap on car radios before radio would play it.
It's not just an American art, though. The affordability of cassettes made them the choice of underground artists all over the world. West Africa had a robust DIY tape scene through the mid-2000s. They were a critical part of Eastern Bloc samizdat, and long after the Iron Curtain fell there's still a cassette culture. Mixtapes have kept immigrants connected to their homelands from London to Philadelphia. Wherever people wanted to make a connection with music, there were mixtapes.
Pop quiz Which bands left sides of their tapes blank to encourage home taping? |
"Cassettes and vinyl are the analogue cockroaches to the nuclear Armageddon that is digital formats."
—Gruff Rhys, singer-songwriter and Super Furry Animals frontman
"The mixtape is a form of American folk art: predigested cultural artifacts combined with homespun technology and magic markers turns the mix tape into a message in a bottle. I am no mere consumer of pop culture, it says, but also a producer of it. Mixtapes mark the moment of consumer culture in which listeners attained control over what they hear, in what order and at what cost."
Can you make a living on mixtapes alone?
Chance the Rapper is giving it a try. The 25-year-old Chicagoan, a Grammy-winner who's appeared on Saturday Night Live, has only released free mixtapes in his seven-year career. Instead of selling albums, he gets a cut from streaming, and the rest comes from merch, touring, sponsorship deals, and the like. It's working: Forbes estimated that he made $33 million in 2017, ranking fifth in the hip-hop industry, by giving his music away.
Have a friend who would enjoy our Obsession with Mixtapes?
Mixtapes of note
- Black Classical's 12-hour, four-part history of Spiritual Jazz
- James Errington's Centuries of Sound, a mixtape for every year of recorded sound
- Middle Eastern Heavens II, vintage Middle Eastern funk and belly-dance
- The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975, a documentary film about the political movement
- The Hidden Mixtape, unfinished tracks by actor Tom Hardy when he was a teen rapper
-
Kendrick Lamar's first mixtape, recorded when he was 16
Only a couple bands on the mixtape C86, released in 1986 by a British music magazine, became even indie household names. But the term "C86" soon became a byword for sensitive jangle-pop and a touchstone for DIY scenes that followed.
The perfect mix
Mixtapes foreshadowed the era of curation as creation because makers put a lot of thought into assembling them. In High Fidelity,* record-store owner Rob Gordon, played by John Cusack, suggests you "kick it off with a killer, to grab attention"—but not your best song!—then "take it up a notch," then "cool it off."
Al Shipley writes in Complex that the first song should set the tone—so you can disrupt it later, while maintaining emotional peaks and valleys. Don't forget to strike an appropriate balance between music you love and music the listener will like. And arrange it all so that the songs "seem to just click into place." As Gordon says, there are a lot of rules. But the constraints, including the technological limitations of physical media, are the fun part.
*The 10th best breakup movie since 1970, according to a sort-of scientific Quartz analysis.
DJ Clue and the modern mixtape
Before hip-hop hit the radio, the mixtape was a way to discover the undiscoverable. After the genre took over the airwaves, mixtape DJs needed a new hook—getting ahead of the radio. No one was better at that than DJ Clue, whose name and love of the board game that inspired it suggested backroom maneuvering. An internship at the RCA label gave him a boost; starting his mixtape series at #26 suggested a deeper track record than he had. But he got the songs, including some from Notorious B.I.G. just before he broke.
Biggie was not happy, but the labels soon figured out that DJ Clue and his peers brought benefits as a medium of distribution. They were more direct than the radio industry, cheaper than a video, and with plenty of tastemaker cred. Instead of fighting them, labels brought the mixtape DJs into the fold; DJ Clue even signed a deal with Jay-Z's Roc-a-Fella to turn his talents into legit commercial releases.
(Literal) baller mixtapes
The mixtape isn't just an audio event. Serving a similar function—for fans and the young men featured on the tapes—is the basketball mixtape. The pioneers were AND1, a shoe and clothing company that assembled highlight videos of streetball stars with a hip-hop soundtrack as a product and a brand promotion; it was so successful the company assembled a live streetball tour, which gave it further material.
At the dawn of the social media era, AND1 wannabees started giving the same treatment to high-school stars, bringing drama to what had been the blurry, dutiful clip reels of itinerant scouts. In 2006 a sports website called Ballislife captured 11th-grader Derrick Rose, now a 30-year-old former NBA MVP; the video was so popular it crashed the website. The next year the company joined YouTube; now it's closing in on 600 million views.
In 2007 the New York Times wrote about the infamous raid on mixtape maker DJ Drama, the legal and economic gray area of the hip-hop mixtape, and its role in the industry just before the streaming era turned everything upside down.
Poll Do you still listen to mixtapes? |
In yesterday's poll about the Purdie shuffle, 43% of you said that when you hear it, the part of your body that starts shaking is your "emotional core."
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