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by Aaron Brady.
Original Post: Mix Tape Era
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I just read (uh, toward the end, skimmed) this awesome letter to Robert Smith by Amanda Palmer and, aside from giving me that claustrophobic omg-I-can’t-deal-with-nostalgia feeling, it made me think about pretty much the only illicit mix tape someone made for me.
It’s 2009, and I’m 26. When I was 14, and starting to appreciate good music it was (follow along) 1997, and MP3 was just about to kick off. But it hadn’t, or at least, it didn’t for those of us hanging out on IRC, with pay-by-the-minute 28.8Kbps modems.
Napster was two years away and back then you needed to find an FTP, upload enough to build a ratio to get the file you wanted, get randomly disconnected when a family member picked up the phone, reconnect, re-upload because the server forgot your ratio (you almost certainly had a dynamic IP) and finally download the track you wanted.
I had a 486 DX2/66, and I had to kill X, go to the console, and use mpg123 down sampling to 22Khz to acceptably play an MP3. To me, this experience gives you the same appreciation for music that thumbing through vinyl in a thrift shop and then getting up to flip the record at half time does.
Anyway, because the MP3 scene sucked, people with no money did things the old-fashioned way - going into basement record stores in Dublin city, and buying quasi-legal concert bootlegs, tape-to-taped for you “while-u-wait”. I don’t count this as my mix tape experience, because I went in knowing what I wanted.
Anyway x 2, back then, IRC was my life, and there was a muso on there called ANDY. ANDY, who in retrospect was not that cool, and who I got to see crying when someone he took to a party a few years later OD-ed (they were fine, btw) had the kind of music taste that seems like black magic when you’re 14, and they’re just a few years older.
ANDY liked Pixies and, though I have no idea how this even ended up happening, made me a mix of Pixies (Into the White, Hey), Frank Black (Men in Black), Sonic Youth (Teenage Riot) and Yo La Tengo (… not sure …).
This was not a life changing experience, at the time, and I think I listened to it a half dozen times and probably lost it when I cast out anything that was on magnetic cassette (much of which was inherited from my older brother, or were tape-to-tape copies of whole albums; nothing cool about that, kids). But, it did plant the seeds of US college music in my head.
Recently I was playing Rockband with some friends and Teenage Riot came on; I was vaguely aware that I knew this song, but not from where and I did an appalling job at keeping up with singing the lyrics, even with them printed in front of me. I think it’s good to rediscover old bands, Amanda Palmer clearly does.
Most of all, I think it’s a little cool to catch just the last little bit of mix tape culture, so I can say I didn’t just grow up in the era of MP3s.
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