Lord, what fools these mortals be.

As I was flying back to Boston last weekend, scrunched into a middle seat with hundreds of, apparently, delicious DirecTV channels to choose from (if only my very own, individually-sized JetBlue monitor actually worked), I ended up spending a good portion of my flight dragging-and-dropping, dragging-and-dropping in iTunes. A couple days prior, I had gotten some kind of funky error and lost all my playlists, and I like to live on the (digital) edge in life– so, no, I’ll not be having any back-ups, but thank you for the kind advice.

Well, (re)creating playlists for myself is a bit tedious, but the altruistic part of me got to thinking about mixtapes. Actually, let’s start at the beginning. Way back when, mixtapes weren’t always an act of altruism. When I was younger, I used to love making mixtapes for myself for special occasions, like when our family went to the beach every summer, and I knew I was going to ride in the car and sit on the sand for hours on end and soak in the scenery there. I wanted to come prepared with a soundtrack. I spent hours getting the timing between songs just right, and one summer I even procured a microphone from somewhere, and coaxed the neighbor-girl into announcing the artist and track name before each song. Since then, my ‘producton’ ambitions have dwindled.

If I get excited about making a MixCD now, it’s usually for someone else. A few years ago, in college, my friend Anaka and I agreed to make a few MixCDs for each other with our all-time favorite songs, with no regard for what we thought the other person would like. In the end, it was great experiment. I learned that no one can really resist Poison’s, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (don’t even try); I’m not the only one with an inexplicable soft spot for Shakira’s “Underneath Your Clothes“; I happily added a new discovery to my already extensive dirty song list (Poe’s “Not a Virgin“); and Storyville’s “Good Day for the Blues,” previously unknown to me before, has, for some time now, recalled the essence of Anaka to my long-distance delight– that is, a Sunday-windows-down-good-conversation-highway-driving-experience.

Because there’s nothing better than hearing a familiar song that brings on that sensation of exquisite nostalgia when you hear it (mind the songs lost to crazy ex’s and bad break-ups… “Every time I hear that fucking Kelly Clarkson song, ‘Since U Been Gone,’ it makes me wanna trash my ex’s apartment and then walk away wearing a trendy hat”), I wanted to pay this tribute to the mixtape, and encourage everyone to “Express Yourself.” And, naturally, a tribute to the mixtape just wouldn’t feel right without a High Fidelity quote (and some useful mixtape guidelines, delivered by Rob Gordon):

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter. There’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind,” but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), 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.”

And in a “Pay It Forward” kind of universe, giving a mixtape just might send one back your way, so I suppose a “letter” is an apt analogy for a mixtape. But to me, mixtapes always seem more like poetry, since you get the “collected works,” not just one “letter” or poem. They contain over a dozen self-contained (but somehow related, if you’re a good mixer) units of nuance and sentiment, so they’re a lot more multifaceted. And if it’s really a mixtape for you, then listening to it is something like opening one of those fantastic, bottomless gift bags with tons of tissue paper and metallic confetti (that, like the long-lost mixtape, no one really spends time on anymore), and several presents inside– but you’re not sure how many or what they could be, so you dig on, happy just to know that they’re all for you.

So, mix on, my friends.

Mix on.