Load them up with party music and they’re soundtracks for our house parties. They’re the background music for our commutes, our workouts and our romantic relationships.
What makes a good mix tape?
Which songs go together and which don’t? What are the tricks to the trade for deejaying your own house party? What if–oh, the pressure–the mix tape is for someone else?
Author Nick Hornby offers a few memorable rules in his novel “High Fidelity” (Penguin, 1995): “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. . . . 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.”
At the time of writing, Hornby was still talking about a tapeNa little, plastic audio cassette invented by Philips Electronics in 1963. Full of static, painstaking to make, prone to running out 10 seconds before the end of “Be My Baby.”
Fast forward to 2005, the digital music age. CD burners have replaced hi-fi recorders, iPods are everywhere and “mix tapes” are created on computer–only they’re called playlists, or something soulless, such as “personal music compilations.” But they’ve never been so popular. A record 141 million songs were downloaded from online music services such as iTunes last year, each one just a tuneless computer file until it was put on a CD or playlist–a mix tape. Copyright law regarding the duplication of digital music doesn’t apply to CDs burned for your own use, so the digital versions are legal.
We ask four experts to give us their advice on music, songs and the art of the mix tape.
Sky Daniels
Radio music director, Chicago
Sky Daniels has been at this game longer than most. He was a Chicago disc jockey for “The Loop” (WLUP) in the ’80s and now is music director for “Nine FM” (WRZA-FM 99.9), a new radio station with an unusual format: It doesn’t have one. With the slogan “We Play Anything,” a typical “Nine FM” broadcast might offer up Jimmy Eat World, the Beatles and LL Cool J back-to-back-to-back; it’s more akin to listening to an MP3 player with 10,000 songs than to a traditional rock station. “Every day we’re creating a giant mix tape,” Daniels says.
Find the right note: Listeners frequently call to ask about the set list, Daniels says. They might point out he has “The Wind Cries Mary” (Jimi Hendrix, 1967) back-to-back with “Beautiful Stranger” (Madonna, 1999), for example.
“They say, `What the hell are you doing?'” Daniels says. “Well, have you ever listened to the end of one song and beginning of next? They’re the same note.” One song blends seamlessly into the next, despite their differences.
Make it your own: Songs can carry powerful memories and associations that will make sense only to you. Be open to it.
“Sometimes it’s temporal,” Daniels says. “I’ll be thinking about a song from back in college, and I go back to that place in time. And it makes me say, well, I’m in the mood for this song next. Or this song. Hmmm, let me see, `The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ (Genesis, 1974). Perfect!”
Let the title decide: Sometimes a few choice words or a concept creates a mix tape. For example, Daniels has a favorite recording in his vaults of a 1960s deejay going berserk on the air over “Born to be Wild” (Steppenwolf, 1968).
“And he’s saying, `What an incredible song! Do I dare play it again? I’ll be fired! Do I dare? I DO!’ And he cues it up again,” Daniels says.
He has his own mix of rebel, screw-the-establishment songs entitled “I DO!”
Felix Da Housecat
Deejay and record producer, Chicago
Felix Stallings Jr., a.k.a. Felix Da Housecat, cut his mixing chops as a Chicago deejay in his teens. He’s the founder of the renowned Chicago house music label Radikal Fear Records and has more than a dozen albums and hit singles under his belt, including the recent “Kittenz and Thee Glitz” (Emperor Norton, 2004).
That’s his profession. Turns out that his hobby is mixing music on an iPod. “It’s kind of my hobby and I didn’t even know it until you asked me about it,” Stallings says in a phone interview from Sydney, where he’s recording a new album. He got his first Apple music player in 2001 and has gone through several since. “I keep wiping out the hard drive or something,” he says.
He gave his wife an iPod for Christmas this year and then took it right back–to lay down several hours of grooves for her to listen to.
Making that compilation has been an eye-opener for him, he says. “There’s a real innocence to it, a joy in giving someone compilation and seeing joy on their face.”
Party or personal: Creating a mix tape for someone else is harder than playing a professional party, Stallings says. His live performances are known for their unpredictability–sampling Radiohead and Kraftwork–and he can afford to be experimental and see how it goes over.
That’s fine for parties, but not for a mix tape for a significant other.
“You’re going to give it to someone else who’s going to play it over and over,” he says.
Focus, focus, focus: Stallings knows his wife likes disco, the soulful stuff like Al Green or Doctor Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. He remembers riding in the car with her playing Depeche Mode and her saying “Oh, what’s that, I like that.”
So that stuff is on the playlist.
“What you’re doing is you’re trying to impress that person because they really look up to you, your taste in music,” he says. “You want to impress them, with `Yo, check this out.'”
James Januszewski
Web site creator, Seattle
Art of the Mix (www.artofthemix.org) is an online hub for mix tape devotees. There’s no music to download, but visitors to the site can read others’ mix tapes and accompanying comments, and post song lists of their own. Since launching Art of the Mix in 1997, Seattle software engineer James Januszewski has collected 80,000 compilations. His own interest in mix tapes pales in comparison to many of his subscribers. “I don’t know if I’m as passionate about mix tapes, as are some members on the site,” he says. “Actually I would call them obsessed.”
Have a topic: A basic rule of making a successful mix tape is thematic consistency, Januszewski says. Party songs. Driving songs. “Have some sort of guiding principal so that it all hangs together,” he says.
Mix tape as party game: Once you graduate beyond putting favorite tunes together, there’s a whole world of high-concept mixes waiting to be discovered. Chains, for example: You start with The Clash covering Bob Dylan, then No Doubt covering a Clash song, and so on.
“It’s tricky to make, but it can actually be sustained for 20 to 30 songs,” Januszewski says.
Or check out this tape; read across the song titles for a warped romantic dialogue: The Smiths, “What Difference Does It Make?”; The Darling Buds, “It Makes No Difference”; Archers of Loaf, “What Did You Expect?”; Roxy Music, “More Than This.”
Make it an art: Januszewski picked the title for Art of the Mix because it sounded cool.
“Art? If anything I would call it a craft,” he says.
But on the other hand a mix tape can be very expressive. A common mix tape he sees is one where the creator is trying to work something out–an emotion, a romantic interest.
“People use mix tape to tell something about themselves, to present an image of themselves. `I listen to this music, here’s what I’m all about,'” he says.
Tony Brummel
Record label owner, Chicago
Tony Brummel is the founder and owner of Victory Records, one of the biggest independent record labels in the nation, with bands such as Atreyu and Taking Back Sunday.
Brummel calls himself a hands-off producer, but still knows his way around an album.
First rule is pacing: Pay attention to tempo and make sure an album–or a mix tape–never stalls out. “A lot of it is flow,” he says, “keeping someone excited about the music.” That doesn’t mean varying fast and slow so much as accessible songs and “serious songs”–that aren’t as catchy right away and take time to get into.
Be open to the unexpected: Brummel says his favorite way of listening is on his PC’s Musicmatch Jukebox software, which is wired into his home sound system. Musicmatch has provided him some discoveries, such as when a song in his collection that he hasn’t heard in years suddenly starts playing. “I put it on shuffle,” he says. “I like to be surprised.”
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Our experts’ mixes
Sky Daniels
“Wonderwall”–Oasis
“Runaway Train”–Tom Petty
“Let Down”–Radiohead
“Wish You Were Here”–Pink Floyd
“Worn Me Down”–Rachael Yamagata
“The Great Puzzle”–Jules Shear
“Jody Girl”–Bob Seger
“Slow Turning”–John Hiatt
“Man on the Moon”–REM
“Don’t Leave Home”–Dido
Felix Da Housecat
“Hypnotic Tango”–My Mine
“Stock Exchange”–Miss Kittin
“Ready 2 Wear”–Felix Da Housecat
“Los Ninos Del Parque”–Liaisons Dangerous
“Compute”–Soulwax
“Leave Them All Behind”–Whitey
“Grey Day”–Zoot Woman
“This Fire (Junior Sanchez Remix)”–Franz Ferdinand
“Let Your Mind Be Your Bed”–Felix Da Housecat
“Exit Music for a Film”–Brad Mehldau
Tony Brummel
“Gold Dust vs. State of Illinois”–Spitalfield
“African”–Peter Tosh
“A Friend for Life”–Warzone
“Born in the ’60s”–The Police
“Read About It”–Midnight Oil
“American Music”–The Blasters
“Babylon’s Burning”–The Ruts
“Beasts of No Nation”–Fela Kuti and Egypt 80
“The Memento”–The Black Maria
“Bimini Gal”–Joseph Spence
“Love My Way”–The Psychedelic Furs
James Januszewski
In place of a mix of his own, Januszewski offers some favorites from the site. This one serves as a soundtrack to George Orwell’s novel “1984”:
“The National Anthem”–Radiohead
“Broken Homes”–Tricky
“Definitive Gaze”–Magazine
“Asbestos Lead Asbestos”–Meat Beat Manifesto
“Sex Is Personal”–The Faint
“Swastika Eyes”–Primal Scream
“Underdog (Save Me)”–Turin Brakes
“Something Must Break”–Joy Division
“Dollars and Cents”–Radiohead
“Rebel, Rebel”–David Bowie
