Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture

This neat little curio--along with sections of Hornby's "High Fidelity" [1995]--is a great artifact for those of us old enough to have shared music with friends via the cassette tape. Before mix-CDs, cassette tapes were a great way to hip your friends to new bands or to write a love letter to your latest crush without having to rely on your own bad poetry. Instead, you had to create a track list that would be impressionable on the recipient, and come up with some cool titles for each side of the cassette. Also, the more Scotch tape to make ex-cellent collage-cover-art with, the merrier! You also had to record the tape in real time, and make sure you could fit everything on the 45 minute side without the songs cutting off. This book captures all of that, including brief notes by the people who submitted some of their mix tapes to Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), editor of the project. There is plenty of cool tape art and great track lists on display here. I like the tape Jim O'Rourke (of everyband, including Sonic Youth, Loose Fur, Gastr del Sol) makes a tape for a female love-interest thats Side One ends with the apocalyptic "Ambulance Blues" by Neil Young. It's these kind of details that make this book so fascinating and fun to flip through. It is an anthropological artifact, documenting the fact that these "unauthorized" tapes, at one point considered threats to the music industry as CDRs and online sharing are now, were really important sentimental, formative and foundational items to many people during the 80s and 90s. Bravo Thurston! Great idea.