Feb
Books to Read: Love is a Mix Tape
I’m not a massive fan of memoirs. There are some good examples (like this, and this), but sometimes this genre seems packed to the gills with middling stories and less-than-stellar writing. One winner that defies the rest of the field, with a funny, sad and sweet story combined with evocative writing, is Love is a Mix Tape.
Remember making mix tapes? The joy of selecting songs from other tapes or CDs, or recording right from the radio, writing the song titles on the small cassette paper, and giving that tape a great, grandiose, grandiloquent title? I was a teenager in the early 90s, and littered my room, my car and my brain with these gems. I loved the tactile sensation of truly creating something, taking the best of what I heard and loved and presenting it in a new way, a totally unique way, a way that gave me intense pleasure upon each new listening. The making of a mix tape, as John Cusack’s character from High Fidelity says:
“Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do’s and don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”
In this book, Rob Sheffield offers his own mix tape manifesto:
“As far as mix tapes go, *Big Star: For Renée* is totally unimaginative. It’s basically just one complete album on each side of a tape. But this is the tape that changed everything. Everything in my life comes directly from this Maxell XLII crush tape, made on October 10, 1989, for Renée.”
The book combines the art and results of mix tape creation with a beautiful story of life, love and loss. Rob suffuses his history of mix tapes with his awkward adolescence, his ecstatic love for the perfectly flawed woman, and his despair when the unthinkable happens. The story is very individual to Rob but one that we somehow identify with - just like a good song and a good mix tape. Rob writes powerfully about his love for indie music in the 90s, and his love for The Girl. Sadly, they both have an end, as most good things do. And it’s an end we meet with genuine emotion because of Rob’s skill at interweaving the music and the meaning.
A wonderful side effect of reading this book was revisiting many 90’s rock gems, and discovering new ones. Offering a real-life mix tape specimen at the beginning of each chapter, Rob brings us back to moments in time with these songs, moments that meant something specific in his own tale, moments for which we have our own meaning. I made myself quite a playlist after reading this book, making my 2008 version of a mix tape on my Yahoo Music streaming list. Sadly, there was no awkwardly-sized cassette label on which to practice my penmenship and naming.
Read this book? Read other books with a skilled interweaving of music and writing? Tell us about it!
