Homemade mixtapes and the beauty of effort

A couple weeks ago I was going through some old boxes, preparing to remove some clutter from my room when I came across a mixtape. I mean an actual mixtape, not a burned CD or iTunes playlist, but an honest to goodness A-side and B-side reel-to-reel magnetic strip containing a homespun mélange of melodious delights. Funny thing about the tape is that it wasn’t made by me or even for me, so how it found a place among my old stuff is beyond me. More importantly is that the joy I got from listening to the tape wasn’t dependent on being personally involved with its production.

 What I heard when I listened to the tape in my car was two things (if you’re paying attention you now know that I have a recently decluttered room and drive a car from the 1990s). The first was that it was a fantastic playlist, including songs from Disney movie soundtracks, TV show theme songs, classic country hits and US Navy SEALs marching cadences. The second thing that was easy to hear if you really listened was the obvious effort that went into its creation.

From the first second that the tape was popped in the first sound you could hear was the warm hiss of dead air coming from the speakers. Following this came the familiar ker-chunk of record being pressed. These sounds reminded me of how much thought and effort it required to make a mixtape. I can remember devoting entire days to creating them. I would sit with a stack of original tapes, and later CDs, along with a calculator and plan out the entire arrangement of songs being careful that the songs made sense to follow or precede one another and would all fit on the side I was working on. I enjoyed putting in a great deal of effort to create just the right mix, but even if you didn’t care it could still take hours to complete a tape.

While I was in school I made a few mixtapes in the hopes of wooing someone special, and I suspect I am not the only one. All were appreciated, I hope, yet none were successful at converting a crush to a date, but that is neither here nor there. I just don’t think there is the same amount of meaning conveyed in giving someone a CD that you burned. I believe it wasn’t just a perfectly crafted collection of music that I was giving to the girls I was interested in, it was also a symbol of my level of interest as evidenced by the effort that went into the tapes creation.

I hope that with the advent of new technologies that continue to make professional and personal tasks easier and faster that we don’t lose too much of the thoughtfulness that comes with devoting time and effort to a project.