Just thoughts...
This post orginated from another unpublished post I wrote a while back...It was a post about music and how I discovered certain songs. Within this post I mentioned how I would wait by the radio (FM 92.3, Tha Beat) to tape 2pac's Do For Love when it first came out. It was nineteen nighty seven yall and it was my intro to the art of making a mix tape...
When I say mix tape, I mean the processing of combining together various songs to create some form of cohesive emotion and/or feeling on an Cassette Tape and not on a playlist and/or cd...
The art of making a mixtape required the mastery of the play, record, and pause button. Nowadays it is a lost art form...but w/ the advancement of technology that is understandable...
Let me stress the use of a Cassette Tape. Unlike a CD and/or Playlist, a cassette tape lacks the ability to skip from song to song, the mix tape needs to be considered in its entirety. This requires the mix tape creator to consider the transitions between songs, the effects caused by juxtaposing a soft song with a loud song, and the overall "narrative arc" of the entire tape.
"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick it off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules..."
~excerpt from High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby
2 comments:
this is so true. i remember crafting mixtapes back in the day. you had to make sure everything flowed right.
but that still holds true for making mix cds these days. the hardest thing to do is pick songs that sounds good after another song. this is a lost art form.
the only people who are concerned with it these days are DJ's. your average everyday person just throws a bunch of crap on a cd and go
haha, i know im a lil younger, but i definitely know about mixing tapes.. me and my sister would do this all the time when we were younger... even though she was the older one, I'm the one who would actually create a list, and have them in a certain order..... as a result a lotta people ask me to make c.d.s for them, and it's peaked my interested to wanting become a dj...
(imagine that! lol)
but yes, there's definitely a "order" u gotta go by
Post a Comment