Kick It Off With a Corker
Mixtapes, John Cusack, High Fidelity, playlists, Christensen, Weatherall, Record Store Day, Fat Tuesday
Mixtapes were obviously a huge part of cassette culture and in many ways they are a phenomenon unto themselves. A good mixtape could make your day infinitely better. A great mixtape--well, a great mixtape might cement a friendship, send a message, capture someone's heart.
It's weird that John Cusack was destined to become the patron saint of mixtapes as a result of two of his roles. We don't know whether Lloyd Dobler had a mixtape or just a pre-recorded cassette of a Peter Gabriel album loaded in the boom box he lofted in Say Anything. While the actor himself hated the gesture, finding it much too passive, it became a GenX crucible, as Chuck Klosterman writes:
"For upwardly mobile women in their twenties and thirties, John Cusack is the neo-Elvis. But here's what none of those upwardly mobile women seem to realize: They don't love John Cusack. They love Lloyd Dobler. When they see Mr Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager he played in Say Anything, a movie that came out more than a decade ago. That's the guy they think he is..." (Chuck Klosterman, "This is Emo" from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, 2003, Scribner)
Then there is his role in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, in which Hornby's protagonist, Rob Fleming (also portrayed on film by Cusack) tries to verbalize those myriad factors that go into the creation of a good mixtape:
You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention… 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.
In the remake/remodel for Netflix Zoe Kravitz replaces Cusack as Rob, the arbiter of cool and owner of a music store. The story gets remade in ways you might find delightful or predictable depending on your viewpoint, but you have to assume there will be fewer rules. In fact, the cast themselves alluded to their dislike of the 'Top Five' concept in an interview, setting themselves apart from a story and a character to which the Top Five idea was central.
In the remake, playlists have replaced mixtapes; the two are treated as interchangeable. But there is little evidence that playlists attract romantics of the Lloyd Dobler/Rob Fleming/John Cusack type. Instead, they appeal more to the obsessive, the collector, the completist, the historian.
It occurs to me that one difference between a mixtape and a playlist is that you are committing to putting a song on a tape, using physical resources. The song takes up a certain amount of tape space. It negates the possibility of other songs. It suggests complementary songs. Will you choose not to include a really long track because it takes up too much space? How about that short song you need so that you can squeeze in one more track near the end of the side?
Even with an audio CD, you have space limitations and so you make decisions about what belongs and what doesn't, how it goes together. The biggest innovation of the CD mix was the ability to shuffle the tracks in random order. That helped keep the list fresh and maybe even offered some interesting juxtapositions and insights to listeners.
With a playlist, you are committing to nothing. One of the reasons playlists are often so long, including everything or becoming encyclopedic is precisely because they occupy no resource space. Streaming services generally allow even free users to create playlists because more playlists is better for them. And it's so easy to skip tracks or shuffle tracks that you don't really give much thought to ordering the tracks.
So, yeah. Playlists represent a lack of real commitment to your material and so does the poo-pooing of Top Five lists. I bet folks who don't like lists also don't like 30-second elevator pitches or 200-word bios.
If there are ten songs on one side of a tape I will learn more about you by listening to those ten songs than I will by listening to a 50 song playlist. Because the songs on the mixtape will all count, while there will be fluff on the playlist. Lots of fluff.
In hip hop DJ culture, the mixtape became a business card for a DJ, offering a live beat-matched set that demonstrated his or her ability to present a great set and their general philosophy and technique of mixing. From there it evolved to featuring new, exclusive artist tracks and making it into its own project.
Mixtapes went along happily as a thriving shadow economy until the 2007 raid on the Atlanta studio of DJ Drama and Don Cannon that led to racketeering and bootlegging charges against the two. But DJ Drama is still making mixtapes, one of the most successful DJs to do so, and he's never seen the inside of a courtroom.
It's part of the culture of hip hop and it also relates to the idea that started in hip hop and, to some extent EDM as well, that music gets created and then dropped on the fans. It relates to the earlier days of dance music and rock and roll when bands took tracks on tape right from the studio to the club, the heady days when a club kid like Madonna could hand her tape over to the club DJ or back to the classic rock days when The Beatles and Stones would listen to each others' acetates at parties and that is how people knew where things were going.
Now pop stars like Ariana Grande or Beyonce release music on their schedule rather than working on a seasonal/yearly schedule that fits into the record labels' marketing plan. Record release, singles releases, touring and live shows, television, and radio. And so it goes, but we've seen how in the past hyper-creative artists, from Prince to Miles Davis, are often miles ahead of the place where their latest record was by the time they get out on the road to promote it.
Mixtapes are the not-quite-obsolete technology that will probably stick around for a long time because they level the playing field and they've already done so, culturally, many times. But these days the word 'tape' is really more of a signifier, referring to the rebellious aspect of cassette tapes. More often than not music is exchanged via USB flash drives, which are cheap and easy to use like cassettes but are even more compact and less fragile.
Music needs an underground mode of distribution that's 'off the grid' for scenes and cultures that need to operate outside the bounds of normal society, and that mode is necessarily going to be something the rest of the world sees as obsolete. You can add to that the hipster factor of people liking something that is more difficult to obtain and more difficult to use because it screens out posers which is something else altogether.
You can depend on the fact that, regardless of the technology used, these ideas of using music to create a community, run an economy, and to express oneself as a listener will continue in some fashion to be part of the musical landscape, if not the new paradigm for the industry itself. Just as the new forms of Lloyd Dobler and Rob Fleming will continue to redefine the relationship between music and its audience.
**If you're interested in the deep history of the hip hop mixtape phenomenon, I recommend 'A (Not At All Definitive) History of Hip Hop Mixtapes' by Noz or 'The Evolution of the Mixtape: An Oral History with DJ Drama' by Dan Rys.**
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Bonus Tracks
It's not really accurate to describe Jon Christensen as ECM's house drummer, but he did play on dozens of the label's sessions, and he passed away this past week at age 76. Christensen is best known for his work with fellow Norwegian Jan Garbarek and with Keith Jarrett's 'European' quartet, of which both musicians were members. If you're looking for a good cross-section of his work, I recommend his Selected Recordings, part of ECM's rarum series. For a review of his incredible career, Nate Chinen's piece at WGBO.com hits the nail on the head.
British DJ, producer, remixer, and musician Andrew Weatherall also passed away suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. Weatherall started as part of the acid house movement as a DJ, starting the fanzine Boys Own, which also lent its name to a record label. Weatherall became a key remix artist, working with acts that included Happy Mondays, New Order, Beth Orton, The Orb, The Future Sound of London, and My Bloody Valentine. His own recordings include The Bullet Catcher's Apprentice (2006), Convenanza (2016), and Qualia (2017). Weatherall produced Primal Screams's Screamadelica album which combined hard rock with loops, house, and rave, was one of the most influential albums of the '90s. Here Primal Scream's frontman, Bobbie Gillespie, remembers Weatherall.
Record Store Day 2020 is April 18, and I'll be covering it in more detail in subsequent newsletters, but set that date aside on your calendar. The Record Store Day 2020 Ambassador is Brandi Carlile, seen here in her announcement video showing some of her vinyl collection as well as her studio. Stay tuned for more details.
Are you familiar with Brostep, Moombahton, or Pagode? Well, they are all musical subgenres and they are applied as tags to a lot of popular music on Spotfiy and other music streaming services. And guess what? They are among the most popular subgenres after you peel away the first two or three genre tags on songs that appear in playlists such as country and pop. This article at Hypebot by Rutger Ansley Rosenborg gives you the lowdown.
Wishing everyone a Happy Fat Tuesday2020. I'll be making BBQ shrimp w/cheese grits, beans w/garlic & onions, and cornbread for dinner tonight. It's that last celebration before Lent begins, so do it up right with some good food, dancing, hoopla, fire on the bayou, and of course some GREAT MUSIC! Here's some live footage of The Meters recorded in 1974. I'm pretty certain that this clip came from Chicago's WTTW-produced Soundstage series. It featured Dr. John with The Meters backing him up, and here he introduces them for a little jam session of their own. Not sure why the Japanese subtitles, but who cares?
One more clip I have to share is Kermit Ruffins doing "Drop Me Off in New Orleans" on the Bonnaroo Jam In The Van Sessions. Always great to see Kermit doing his thing.