Ode To The Mighty Mixtape
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Mixtapes were hand made, literally by hand. It was an extremely Analog Experience, complete with buttons to mash and items to hold and decorate. Hello World is a song like we're singing.
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Come on, get happy.
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A lot of love. It is what we'll be bringing
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we'll make you happy.
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Welcome to the pop culture Preservation Society, the podcast for people born in the big wheel generation who at some point in their lives circled a boombox in the Sears wish book. We believe our Gen X childhoods gave us unforgettable songs, stories, characters and images, and if we don't talk about them, they'll disappear, like Marshall will and Holly on a routine expedition. And today, we'll be saving an art form that belongs almost solely to Gen Xers, the friendship bracelet of the 80s and 90s, the analog version of posting and shearing. We are talking about the making and gifting of mixtapes. I'm Carolyn, I'm Kristen, and I'm Michelle, and we are your pop culture preservationists. We're
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gonna start today with a little story so a boy and a girl have a legendary love affair, the kind where everyone else is watching and thinking that's exactly what they want to it's good. It makes people happy just knowing that these two people found each other. But then something happens, and it ends, the boy breaks the girl's heart, and everyone is in shock. Everyone is like, what happened? It's horrible. It's the saddest The girl has ever been in her whole life. But after a while, a long while, like months and months, she picks herself up and she moves on, and just when she's found someone new, there's a knock on the door. It's the boy, he's standing there, saying nothing. Instead, he hands her a mix tape. There's no label, no insert, no track listing. He just hands it to her and asks her to listen. And then he walks away. She closes the door and puts the tape in the boom box, and the first song is pictures of you by the cure.
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If only I thought I'm gonna cry. Oh no, oh no, am I crying? If only I thought of the right words, I could have held on to your heart, if Omar thought of the right words, I wouldn't be breaking
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up. All she had to do was listen to that first song, and she knew exactly what he was trying to say. This was the power of the mixtape.
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What happened?
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You can't leave us hanging. What happened? Did she go back with the first boy who brought her the mixtape, or she said she was with someone else, she was with somebody else. And so now she's like, Oh my God, what do I do? I have two choices.
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Are you her? I mean, clearly, yeah, I'm gonna be, like, a big deal, yeah, I don't know if this is some plot to a movie that I didn't see. Oh my gosh, okay. Three years later, they get married. Three decades later, they celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. They have a house and a dog. They have a grown man for a son.
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That sounded weird, and it's all because of a song by the cure. Oh, wow. The end.
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Gosh, that is so great. That's the beginning of a novel of, like, some cute little love story that's powerful. And then it goes back, like, that's the beginning, and then all of a sudden, we're back. It's like 500 days of summer, yeah, yes, yeah. And it's funny, I hadn't that's always been a legendary moment in our shared history. But it wasn't until I was doing this episode when I realized it all hinged on a mixtape, and I remember hearing that opening to pictures of you and listening to the words, and just starting to cry because I knew exactly what he was saying, and he couldn't say it with words. Right
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Way to go, Mike,
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love you all the more. Oh my gosh, that's so great. Has song been like a special song for you guys? Like, do you listen to it? No. I mean, think about it. The whole reason he had to do a mixtape is because he can't say the words. So he certainly.
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Not going to talk about it now, right? Yeah, this is true, but it worked. What a great story. So Kristen, just to help me with the story a little bit, what year were we talking here that? This is 1991
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Okay, wow, so powerful. Well, just for all of our listeners, you probably realize that mixtapes were born in the 1980s and they peaked in the mid 1990s so you were square in that space, Kristen, so were you Mr. Mike, the mixtape truly belongs to Gen Xers. Boomers were adults and millennials were babies, when these mixtapes emerged as a DIY way, a very DIY handmade, homemade way to share music. There might be a few older millennials who embraced the making of mixtapes, but they wouldn't have had them very long before their desktop computers started coming with CD drives. And much like today's friendship bracelets, these mixtapes were created out of a need to communicate something, something for people they wanted to connect with. Way to go, Mike, they are exchanged with friends and contain sentiments often easier to express through a bracelet or a song than actually saying them out loud. Yeah, gosh, Mike, aren't you glad that art form was available to you?
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We all know that the mixtape is so much more than than just a collection of songs. It was a curated journey of emotions and memories. Each track was carefully selected, often with personal significance. The act of creating and sharing a mixtape was an intimate exchange, a way to connect with others on a deeper level, truly a labor of love. I really, I love how you say it was an intimate exchange, because that was true, even if it was a party tape, right? It doesn't matter. It didn't have to be about love. It could be no matter what it was. It was intensely personal, and it was about making connections with people. It was cutting and pasting and labeling and decorating and communicating some kind of message, even if it was like post punk or or grunge or whatever, it didn't really matter. It was intensely personal. It's the alt it was the ultimate gift of self expression, right? And I love we read an article preparing for this episode. It was on medium. But I love that the author said the gift of music creation is powerful a love language to be wielded with care. In fact, the courtship method that I gratefully stumbled into has persisted for decades. But I love the fact that it's a musical courtship or musical friendship, right? Yes, and, and I love just the the idea of that self expression. Because, like what you said, Kristen, it's not just the the very labored choosing of songs and the meaning. It's all of it. It's the writing and how you're going to write it, and maybe you're going to put a little colored sticker on it, or it's, it's such self expression. And even the, you know, you said courtship or friendship. But if you think about it, we courted friends also, right? Like there was somebody that you met or somebody you've been hanging out with, you make them a mixtape. We are definitely friends. Yeah, right, I made you a mixtape. We're friends now, yeah, and it's really a way to put your fingerprint in a way, on something. So somebody learned so much about you without you having to say a lot about yourself. So in terms of courting and friendship, and I think for me, the mixtape really was finding its legs and stuff during my college years. And this is a time where you don't know people super well. It's not like you've gone to school with them for, you know, since second grade or anything. So it's really a chance to kind of tell a little bit about who you are through song. Yeah, yeah. You were, you were, you were making a statement about yourself. All right, classwell, Professor Newman is here to tell you a few things about the history of the cassette tape that that no one asked for. Okay, so homemade mixtapes are a hallmark of the 1980s prior to this, cassette tapes for home use were really not a thing. The quality of car stereo systems was improving, and you can't play a vinyl record in your car. And also, guess what? Year The Sony Walkman was introduced? 1979 boom, yeah, yeah. We're now in this new era in which our music went with us and you guys, wasn't that mind blowing? Yeah, yeah, mind blowing. Good thing. We had those little like those little foamy things on our ears to keep our brains from falling out. And I want to do a little shout out for not all of us had the little yellow thing, because Sears also did make
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a their version of the Sony Walkman, and maybe it was called the Tony Walkman,
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strollman, or something, the talkman. Well, by 1980 bands were starting to release their albums on both vinyl and cassette, and at the same time the quality of home.
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Home Recording tape decks. Remember, those was also improving. I mean, how many of you got a boombox for Christmas in 1980 right? Yes, everybody raise your hand. My sister did, I think, yeah. And all of this allowed the cassette to become the dominant format to the point where vinyl was no longer the number one choice. And wah wah, the eight track tape basically disappeared. Overnight, gone so fast. Yeah, this is gone. So because consumers, though could now buy blank tape, we now had the power and the technology to create our own albums of favorite songs using our new high tech, high quality home tape recorders, those that we got for Christmas, and we could connect it to your record player or the radio, or if you had the coveted dual cassette recorder, the sharp pink one, like I did, the tape to tape, you could connect it to another cassette tape. Wasn't that great.
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Well, throughout the 80s and the 90s, mixtapes were a very important part of our Gen X youth. I don't think that can be said lightly. I think just from what we've talked about, like mix tapes, even if, like me, you were making them and just keeping them for yourself. But eventually, the increased availability of CD burners and our desktop computers met a very quick death for the old fashioned homemade mixtape. We could still do that. We could still make a compilation of songs, but now it's just as easy as dragging and dropping. And so cassette players started disappearing in our cars. Everything was being replaced by CD players very quickly. Yeah, the modern day mixtape, the closest we're gonna get is making a shareable playlist on a streaming service. But what we're learning is you can't just replace mixtapes with modern day playlists, because mixtapes differ from playlists in that there, the mixtape was carefully crafted to tell a story or to create a specific mood. It wasn't just a collection of songs. They were they were gifted. They were personalized. They were intended to evoke something or communicate a message. Like I made a mistake in breaking up with you, and I think that we should get back together. And I don't know how to use my words so, and I can't hear my words, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna use the cure instead you. You so carefully chose songs that blended one into the other. They were meant to be listened to in a sequence you didn't shuffle. There was no shuffle. Oh, my God, right, I would screw it all up. That, and that was part of the art. Of it is that you were learning what song sat well next to each other in a playlist. It doesn't matter, because most people will shuffle. So it's literally just a collection of songs. Mix tapes were hand made, literally by hand. It was an extremely Analog Experience, complete with buttons to mash and items to hold and decorate. Playlists, on the other hand, are often algorithmically generated, and they there's no personal touch. Maybe Spotify made it for you. Spotify thinks they know you. But if we if that's what we call knowing each other, we are in a lot of trouble. You guys, some people, of course, there are people out there who still excel at the creation and sharing of playlists with with great intention, as we did with mixtapes. And I thank God for them, because it's the closest we're gonna get to the mixtape today, and those people are doing so based on their previous history, this is just what I've noticed. Yeah, the people who are still doing that are doing it based on their previous history of creating analog mixtapes. A digital native wouldn't think about it in those same terms. They would simply think about it as a collection of songs, yeah, exactly. And to your point, Kristen, about just all of the physical aspects of this, pushing the buttons, all of that thing this was very tactile. And we talk about this a lot in the podcast, about things that, like reading the newspaper, things that we felt and had to manipulate and handle. We just don't have that experience anymore. And I think that adds to it too, the feel of the cassette, the opening of that hard plastic case, the clack, the sounds of the sounds of it. It was a multi sensory experience where, you know, just pushing or clicking and whatever now to choose a song is very it's just tapping, right? We use one finger, well, two, maybe two fingers. This, the feeling is always the same. It's a glass under your finger, and it's one motion, and that's all that we do. Yeah, it's not a sensory experience at all. I do. I have continued to try to make playlists with intention and gift them to people, but when I do it, I'm finding that it's not being received in the same way as the mixtape was. I email it or normally I will text it, and sometimes I'll find out that they never even opened it, and I'm like, but I made it for you, but the.
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It being isn't valuing it in the same way, because it's not a labor intensive handmade item in the way that it used to be. When I text a link to a playlist I've made for them, I'm afraid what they're seeing is just another text, right? Just like think about when we've talked about the handwritten letter, and, you know, we might be communicating the same words, but the person knows this is something physical that I'm holding, that you actually held, that you took the time to not only find a pen and the paper and write it, but to lick the envelope, to get a stamp, to go to the mailbox. There's so much more intention with that. It feels more special then, yeah, we're getting links sent to us all the time. It's like, oh, is this an article in the star trib, or is whatever it's like there, it's missing that piece that I think we're missing so much of. Well, you're missing the meaning. All right, let's talk about the logistics. People, okay, first you'd need a blank cassette, and you had to decide, because they're, as I can tell you people, because I have levels of like, those were the status ones. And if you're gonna give mixtape, are you gonna give it on the cheesy just Kmart brand, or are you gonna go, oh, you would never, you can't, right? Because remember, there were then the clear ones that you could kind of see through, yes, oh yeah, you know, you could see all the mechanism of the actual cassette. And then remember the Memorex ones that came in, like neon colors, like neon 80s colors, they were clear and they had, like hot pink geometric shapes on it. Oh yes, next you'd have to gather your desired songs. And one What if you didn't own the album? You're gonna have to wait for it to come on the radio. And one article I read, one of the creators of his mixtape would also get stuff from MTV. He would get songs from MTV, like, just put the radio the tape up to MTV. Yeah, kind of like the Fitzpatricks, but your unit recording shows, yeah, exactly. Are you just gonna sit by the radio? What are you gonna do while you're sitting by the radio? Yeah, and you are, it's doodle, and you're probably sitting there, if you're like me, you're sitting there with your fingers in position, oh yes, because you don't want to miss the beginning. You can only hear the song and run over
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play and record and pause at the same time, right?
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Let go of play and record. But do you guys remember the pause would kind of go up a little bit, but then you had to depress it a little bit more. Little bit more. You had to have your finger. It had to be depressed so that when it started and you lifted your finger off Pause, pause went straight up. It didn't just go that little like centimeter. So you would go all three at once. And then you would do the little pause, down again. Oh yeah. And then you would just wait and wait, just wait, sitting there, holding it, holding it. And then what if the DJ started talking? That was a whole nother kind of thing. You had to decide what you were going to do. Were you going to, like, take that part out? Were you going to blend it in? Were you going to, in this case of the same essay that I read where the guy listened to MTV,
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he would sometimes narrate in between the songs, but he would love himself, yeah. I mean, talk about, okay, that's brilliant. Because, remember, there were oftentimes you would have all of your songs on the tape, but there's a little bit of time left over at the end of the tape, but it's not a whole song. Maybe it's 30 seconds, but you have to record something for that 30 seconds. Because if you flip the tape over now, the new site is playing 30 seconds into the song, right? Rewind? No, you can't rewind. So you need, like, a little snippet of a song. You need to record something. Yeah, yeah. Fillers did exactly it again. It was an art I remember, like adding up the times of the songs and try to figure it was like a little puzzle.
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Now I'm just also as you guys were describing the waiting for the radio to play the song and having to do everything exactly at the right time, and the half push and all of that. I can't No wonder we have anxiety
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listening to Michelle describe that guys, it was a lot. And if you were making it for another person, especially if it was somebody you were trying to impress, you wanted to you wanted to show that you had skill. You couldn't have it go dunk donk. The worst is if you could hear the play and record go down, that's why you wanted it already down. But finger on the pause button. You were gonna chop it off. You were gonna be everything was deftly done. They have to be doubt. This was an all encompassing endeavor. It wasn't just the songs, it was the effort put into it. And the receiver kind of knew that. And then there were the rules. Yeah, we know this from John Cusack in high fidelity. Here's the quote from Nick Hornby's book 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 off with a Corker to hold the attention. I started with Guy.
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To get you off my mind, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, and if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two, and then you've gotta 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 the 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. Oh, there are loads of rules.
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And it's so funny because I hadn't thought about that, but it's all true. I worked with every single one of those rules. You can't put two songs by the same artist next to each other. That's lazy. This is why I didn't make mixtapes. I'm already exhausted.
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My what I think of were mixed tapes in my in the 80s, I was just making playlists. Yeah. Well, when I asked Andy what his rules were, because Andy is known for kind of being a little prolific when it comes to putting musical he's a mixed master. Well, Master might be an exaggeration, but when I asked him if he had any rules, here's what he told me. He's kind of he said, No, it was just a gut feeling, like he just knew what kind of song needed to come next, and he couldn't really articulate it to me. He's like a mixtape savant.
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We also asked our good friend and follower, Shane, a lot of you guys know him as 87 ragged tiger on Instagram, because he is kind of our musical guru. He is our Gen X 90s musical guru. We know Shane would have made mixtapes back in the day and so. And one reason we know this is because he makes such great playlists for us now. Yes, so he is one of the people that is very intentionally and carefully creating playlists, and he shares them with the people that he loves, well, and also Shane is someone who knows all the deep cuts on record, right? And that is very important when creating a mixtape, right? So I reached out to Shane, and I said, Hey, Shane, did you have any rules? Well,
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as we know, Shane took this very seriously. So within 30 minutes, though, I get a text that's, you know, 12 inches long. It's like the Bible, yeah, but, but so thoughtful as we knew, as we knew his rules would be. And here are just a few. First of all, Shane says these are soundtracks. So plan thoughtfully. Pick the perfect canvas for your creation. You guys just talked about that. He says the Memorex pink stripe, C 60, or the blue stripe, C, 90. Oh, that is very specific, very specific, isn't it? Yeah, and here's, here's seven songs per side on the pink, 11 songs per side on the blue. No exceptions. Leave room to breathe.
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No caps, no cutoffs, Oh God no, right? You can't, yeah, we're not kindergarten babies, right? And then he says, Be thoughtful and creative with the titles of your mixtapes. Be original. Make it your own. I love that, Shane, we think you need to teach a course on mix tapes, yeah,
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because there was the naming of the tape, right? I mean, good, gracious, that was some serious pressure. The name could have been very straightforward, describing the purpose for which this tape would be used, or it could be personal. Could be a private joke, tongue in cheek, an invitation to be friends or lovers or party people or study buddies, but above all, that title better be catchy and clever, and you guys, you had that tiny, what half inch space of cardboard to make this right the first time? Oh, good point, right? Yeah, no deleting. There's no delete. So then we did throw this out to all of our listeners and followers, and we got some really, really good ones, you guys. I love everything I was dreaming of. It was so great. I know, so good. Okay. I love beyond the tulips. Her title, the one she remembered, was Anne and her friends. Hot new tape for getting tan and meeting guys
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the way. So good. Dead sleep pod, jams, j, A, M, Z, naturally jams sandwich, and she had a hot side and a cool side.
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And I didn't get that at first. I was like, why the sandwich? Oh, I get it. It's a jam sandwich. I love that sandwich. Jessica dot summers dot photography. I mean, we know, we know what this is. Hers is just called depressing songs.
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I need this tip for this purpose, postcards for therapists. Explain this, but I love it. Confetti and little thirsties. I know I want to know what that is, but it's a fun one. I love it. I also like Ellen. Ellen watermelon, bimbo mix one, two and three.
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What were you guys getting ready to do? Ellen,
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those are so funny. You know me and my word play. I love Scott trip balloons. But.
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Virginia is for clovers, yes,
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right? Well, no clovers, but
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there's a story there, right? Like, is it a road trip or something? And somebody sees the Welcome to Virginia sign, this was, and these, and when some friend says, Why did, why is Virginia for clovers? You know, there's a story, you know it, yes. Oh, those are so fun. I really liked also young, your magical midlife had a tape of all ska music called skank and skank, yeah, that's, that's terrific.
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When I read that, when she had that comment, I thought she just to put a tape of she had a
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typo
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skank music.
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But then I think the one that actually wins for me, surreal, housewife of New Jersey. She had one called the lamest mix Meredith ever heard.
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I wonder if she's Meredith, and I wonder if she made that or if she got that one. It's so funny. And then, just like the party mixtape and the depressing songs, Alexis Greaves says she had one simply called breakup songs, and she would play this for friends when a boy broke up with them and they needed to cry, and it just seems like she was providing a service. Yes, right? This is a service. You know what? Alexis is, a therapist. Now, look at that. Okay. She was already providing therapy. She was She mentioned two songs that were on her breakup tape. One of them was against all odds. How can I just
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let Can I just let you walk away? Just let you live without a trace. When I started
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taking every breath with
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you, you're the only one really knew me long really
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knew me,
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your heart tightens just a little bit, but then it's gonna tighten a little more when she puts don't give up.
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You're
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just don't give up. Don't give up. It's gonna be okay. All of these names show very much how the mixtape had a purpose. And by purpose, I don't mean working out or chilling. That's a playlist you may go workout playlist. You may get, you know, the making dinner playlist that's chilling. Those are my dinners playlist, your dance playlist. Those are current day purposes for having a collection of songs. The purpose of a mixtape was often more personal or more whimsical, like bimbo mix, one, two and three.
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There's even, we're totally getting this. You guys. There is a game that illustrates this point really well called, appropriately, mixtape. It's just called mixtape, and I love this in the description of the game, they kind of emphasize the purpose of the mixtape. It says this is directly from the game, relive your memories, share your life soundtrack with your friends. Behind every memory is a song, and mixtape lets you share the most memorable of life experiences with your friends through music with 200 cards, the possibilities are endless. Mixtape lets you be vulnerable and show emotions by playing songs instead of telling people about the way they feel.
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Okay. There you go, Mike, there's a stock. Yeah, I got it. Wait. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So basically how you play this game is you pull a card, somebody play pulls a card, and it gives you a scenario like road trip or breakup or friends forever. And then everyone cues up a song on their phone, and you play it, and then you like, you think this would be the best song for that scenario, and then you vote on whose pick is the best. That's fine. That sounds so fun. I think that's an episode, don't you? It could be, yeah, that would be fun. We're definitely, oh, now I have a lot of pressure, yeah, I know. Okay, so I still have, I got rid of a lot of my mixtapes, but I kept the inserts. It was sort of like I was recognizing that I couldn't play the tape anymore. But that's not the important part. The important part was the person who made this for me, and what they named it and what they put on it. So one of my favorites is called poo's favorites, as in Winnie the Pooh, and it was made by my friend Martha, and it was a friendship tape. She was like, Here you go. I made this view friend, and it's named because of the introductory song, Christopher Robin and now
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walking along,
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posing our questions to our land deal is our days.
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Simply the lead song of your tape is really important because it sets the tone for the whole tape. And this was the first song, and it was house of poo, coronavirus.
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Yep, it's Loggins and Messina, yeah, oh yeah, the OG, the OG, and then he does it on the lullaby, yeah. And so that was her lead song. And so conceivably, all of the songs on this tape would be favorites of Winnie the Pooh. So
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help me get back to the house.
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You'd be surprised. There's so much to be done.
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Count all the bees in the heart,
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chase all the clouds from the sky. And then this is something that relates back to our podcast, because every week we open this podcast by saying people from the big wheel generation, Martha and I together made a tape called Songs from the Big Wheel generation. This is where that comes from. It was a collection. I know this is like in 1990 so is this a playlist or a mixtape? No, this is a mixtape that she and I actually made after going to a used record store. We were kind of getting our nostalgia on. It was the first time we had felt nostalgia. We were making connections over the songs that we loved when we were kids. So we went to a used record store and we bought a whole bunch of 40 fives, and we brought them home and put them on our dad's stereo and made a mixtape. It's called Songs from the Big Wheel generation. I found a 45 of shadow dancing, and I just about wet my pants. You're
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right. Heaven in your right. I was chasing your direction. I was telling you no.
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Last and don't forget, we would often have different names for side one and side two also. So my friend Colleen got in on this nostalgia mixtape making, and she sent us a tape to share. And side one of it was called the angel hustle. Side two was called Charlie's choice. What I know? Okay. Then, right before we were married, Mike was living in Minnesota. I was in grad school in North Carolina for two years, and he sent me a tape called longer days and longer nights.
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Everybody. I'm just over here going, Mike, this is powerful stuff. I know little romantic you. It's in there. It's in there. And there was a little foreshadowing on that tape in a song called, will I be married by the Jayhawks.
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Will I be married this girl I see coming down the road? I
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think he might be a mixtape master. Oh my gosh, yeah. But then I remember that story at the top of the episode where he brings me that tape that has the cure on it, and I know immediately what he means. In return, I make him a tape, and this tape is called fortunes never lie, because just prior to him arriving on my doorstep with that mixtape, I had opened a fortune cookie, and there was a fortune inside that said, someone you love will soon be coming back to you.
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Mm, hmm, wow. And so I took that fortune and I taped that on the inside of the insert. I made a tape for him in answer to his for me, called fortunes never lie. Do you still have it? Mm hmm.
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I'm speechless. That's so cute. I know isn't that great? Gosh, that it's yeah, that is beyond great, and it is full of early 90s college radio favorites like rem and Sinead O'Connor and the Rembrandts. This is before the Friends Theme made them famous. You
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years since you held a baby while I ranked bedroom baby.
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That's just the way it is. Baby, music. I will tell you, the title of the mixtape that really changed the trajectory of my life.
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Life is called mellow mix,
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and I'm just going to leave it at that. You'll get to hear a lot more about it, and it's a good story. So we've talked about how personal these mixtapes are, but there were some definite patterns that emerged in why we created mixtapes for people, friendship, love, courtship, heartbreak, road trips commemorating a shared experience, remembering good time, staying in touch, the long distance relationship, and sharing no music you love with the people you love. Road trips were a huge one. You didn't go on a road trip without making a mixtape first. I think country roads was on every road trip mix I ever made or received that was just the number one single mom, almost heaven,
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West Virginia,
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Blue Ridge mountain.
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But sharing new music with your friends was huge. My boyfriend's brother worked at Great American music. He was like Ron the stereo guy from Fast Times, basically, and so he was introducing me to new stuff all the time in the form of mixtapes. My friend Patty worked at music land, and my friend Martha was just basically a music savant, and she knew so much more about music than I did. And here's just a short list of the music I learned about because of a mixtape that somebody gave me, level 42 Thomas Dolby, scritty Pilate, English beat, Aztec, camera, prefab sprout. These were not bands you were going to hear on the radio, and this is how we heard all of those bands. You had to get them from word of mouth. Half
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cake. Can
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he better
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love God,
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fashioned by faith, suffer so hard from
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the games,
Unknown Speaker 37:00
but this is the best when I was in college, I was a camp counselor. If you went to cheer camp in the summer, this is the same thing, except for the dancers. We drove all over the country in a minivan to all of our camp destinations, and at each new place, we'd head straight to the main office to see if anyone had sent us mail. And my friend Joe got a mixtape in the mail from a friend who wanted to introduce her to this new song that he thought was going to be huge. He said, you've never, I promise you, you've never heard anything like this before. So we put, I remember this so distinctly. We put the tape in, and we all huddled around this boom box, and it was unlike anything we had heard before. And this is what it sounded like.
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The
Unknown Speaker 38:10
I love that he was so excited that he sent it in the mail. He sent it in the mail. Yes, Guns and Roses and nobody. They're like, we're like, Guns and Roses, interesting. And then it said, sweet child, oh my, oh My. Now.
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Day, I'd probably break down and cry.
Unknown Speaker 39:02
Me. So there was one purpose that has carried through from the OG days of mixtapes all the way to today's playlist, and that's the party mix, boys and girls, oh yes. And I want to share a little bit about the party mixtapes at Trinity University in the 80s. Okay? Because Andy, my husband, and his fraternity, were known for their incredible party tapes. Those tapes were so popular that other fraternities and sororities asked to borrow them for their parties. As some of you know, that would be a big deal, right? So, along with his roommate, John, who Andy said was the real mastermind behind these famous party mixtapes, he, being John, had carried the torch of mixed tape master from his brother who had graduated. So this is an ongoing it was a legacy. It was a mixed tape legacy, without a doubt, without a doubt, yes. So they would carefully Cure.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Write these works of art. So John had a pretty sophisticated stereo setup. So they would sit Andy and John with albums strewn across their dorm room floor. And while they had a pretty, you know, extensive collection of albums, they would often borrow albums from friends, or sometimes, like some of the sororities of attorneys might kind of hire them to do it so they could be having those kind of collections in front of them. I want to share a little bit about that experience, because I remember those mixtapes, and I remember dancing to those songs, and sometimes they were songs I had never heard before, which was kind of another fun aspect to these mixtapes. Here we were at college, and people were bringing their own musical tastes from kind of maybe their own corners of the country, right? And so these tapes introduced me the Jersey girl to the Gap Band to more stay in the time Willie Nelson. I remember hearing Chaka Khans through the Fire and falling in love with it. Fall
Unknown Speaker 41:24
Oh, I'm gonna go listen to that song right after this guy, you guys, that is a good song to just wail to. That's a karaoke song. Such a great song. And again, I asked Andy, well, were there any rules to these tapes? And again, he said, no, there weren't any strict rules, like four fast songs followed by two slow songs. He said, they just went by. What felt right? Yeah? So maybe, again, that's being a little mastermind about, yeah, it is. But you're but all of those, like, except for the except for post Purple Rain, you weren't hearing the time on the radio. You weren't hearing the Gap Band on the radio, right? So you depended on the people with those mixtapes To learn about those bands. You
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should find more
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there's another purpose for mixtapes at which Andy excelled, if I'm remembering correctly, and not from personal experience, because you told us,
Unknown Speaker 42:59
thank you. And it's a purpose that's so important, you guys, it warrants its own episode, right? Carolyn, Oh, indeed, it does. You guys, this would be the makeout mix.
Unknown Speaker 43:15
I need to even define it any further. I've been feeling too
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Barry White going on,
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whether you used it or just fantasized about using it. We will be doing a deep dive like PhD level make out mixtape. 101, on not only the makeout mixtape in general, but on Andy's famous mellow mix. And mellow mix. Two,
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the return, the sequel,
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yes and no, because you know what? This is, how clever my hubby is. It's not the number two. It is T, O, O, he's such a word in addition to, right and like, also, foreplay. Is your foreplay? I know literally, right?
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It makes its way here. These tapes are so epic, they've inspired us to devote an entire episode to the mixes we remember from another era in which estrogens work freely through our bodies. Those were the days my friends and we thought they'd never end
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the classic make out session. Mixtape is the subject of our next episode. Hey, all it takes is some of those songs to get the estrogen flow on through my body. I found that out this week as I was preparing for the next episode. Oh, wow, that's right, yeah, flow. That's a big word. I could say trickle through.
Unknown Speaker 44:44
It was just a trickle. Is a big word. I would say it was more of a drip, yeah? Well, you know what, everyone listen next week for the song that recently makes the estrogen flow through my body, huh?
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That's not a cliffhanger. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 45:16
I think it is very clear that mixtapes were important in a way that we couldn't even fully understand at the time. And people miss them. If you Google the word mixtape, you'll find articles like Requiem for the mixtape PCs killed the mixtape star, and this is the best. The sexy mixtape is dead, and high fidelity can't bring it back.
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And the reason we miss them is because they helped us express ourselves and connect with other people. Writer Max Mobley says in Requiem for the mixtape for the socially awkward and those struggling to introduce sex or a relationship into the daily routine, the mixtape could express what you wanted better than that lethal combo of mouth and brain after any number of beers.
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And usually I like to end our episodes by giving you permission to recapture that thing from our past. But in this case, I'm I'm not sure that I can. We just we don't have that kind of equipment anymore, but if you still have your mixtapes, do not put those in the garbage just because you can't listen to them. Those contain your heart and soul. They're now ancient artifacts of both your memories and your music history. So take pictures of the track list and send them to us. We want to see them, even if we can't listen to our own. It's fun to see yours. Thank you for listening today, and we will see you next week. Today's episode was brought to you by all of our wonderfully generous supporters on Patreon. That's P, A, T, R, E, O n.com,
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and especially Susan Barbara, Elaine, Charles, Linda, Helene, Christina and Heather. Thanks so much. Thank you, everybody, you guys. And in the meantime, let's raise our glasses for a toast courtesy of the cast of Three's Company, two good times, two Happy Days, Two Little House on the Prairie. Cheers. Cheers. The information,
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opinions and comments expressed on the pop culture Preservation Society podcast belong solely to Carolyn the crushologist and hello Newman, and are in no way representative of our employers or affiliates. And though we truly believe we're always right, there's always a first time the PCPs is written, produced and recorded in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home of the fictional wjm studios and our beloved Mary Richards, Nanu. Nanu, keep on truckin, and May the Force Be With You.