Digital Killed the Mixtape Star

We’re all quite old, aren’t we?

That “we,” of course, means those of you who, along with me, experienced the mixtape as something other than a piece of dialog in a Tarantino film, and remember when $200 got you a thing you could hold in your hand that played music, as opposed to a thing that plays music and makes phonecalls and writes short or long letters to your friends and colleagues and is also a rolodex and a compass and a chronograph and a camera and a candle.

Today, we can buy any app we need to feel young (at heart, in mind, of body…)

But the artifacts of our youth are barely recognizable to the people
Who today comprise the ranks of the actually young

They don’t love the weight and the warble
They resent the heft and the hiss
And they don’t understand how the choices work.

“Where are my hundreds and hundreds of options?

There’s no everywhere, there!”

They want the freedom of 1000 portable files
light as a (condensed package of perhaps 999) feather(s)

They don’t understand and so cannot know how to want
The more powerful choice: this baker’s dozen of songs
I will bring and hear and carry and sing
With me, this whole day, just these.

Bonus for anyone who gets this far down–if your nostalgesic gland is stimulated and you haven’t got an antique tape-player to dust off, how about joining up with the International Mix Tape Project?

Sort of a book of the month club, except instead of a book it’s a CD Mix, and instead of a publishing house it’s sent to you by a stranger, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to send it back, and all it costs is that you send a CD Mix of your own to some other stranger, and I think I’m going to sign up right now… Or as soon as I figure out if it’s worth $10 every six months…

Update: Images courtesy of flickr commons, hover to see credits and link to sources