“The stories are endless. There is the guy who in college used the same mix tape to impress three different girls — his girlfriend, a fling and a prospective second fling — simultaneously and got away with it. There is the 13-year-old whose musical existence was shaken out of a Sex Pistols-Beatles bipolarity by mix tapes from cooler, older friends. There is the guy who made a romantic tape called ‘You Best Believe I’m in Love’ with nothing on it but New York Dolls songs. In retrospect, the era of the mix tape — which began not long after Philips unveiled the audiocassette in 1963, crescendoed throughout the ’80s and probably peaked in the early ’90s — looks like a vast, unintentional folk art movement. Nearly every music-loving teenager in the country participated. Think of it this way: If every kid who spent a Saturday afternoon making a mix tape over the past 25 years had instead spent that time painting, sculpting or writing poetry, the ’80s and ’90s would be known as a period of unbridled renaissance in American outsider art. Now that era is over, the hours of tape-deck labor replaced by the drop-and-click production of the iPod playlist. At least that’s the sense one gets from ‘Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture.’ Edited by Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, ‘Mix Tape’ claims to be the first book wholly devoted to mix-tape culture. …”
Salon
W – Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture
Wired: The Best 90 Minutes of My Life
NPR – The Mix Tape: Art and Artifact (Audio)
amazon