Home Taping is Killing the Music Industry

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Originally uploaded by Sunday Girl.

I love mix tapes! As long as I live I will never stop loving them, ever since my first feeble attempts to record Madonna and Mariah Carey off the radio and inevitably getting a whole bunch of annoying announcers in the mix. To the perfection of my skills in high school because I was so sick of listening to the crap they played on the radio and so I would have a constant stream of good music playing in my car (this was of course once I had a car with a tape deck and not an 8-track). I still make mixes from time to time, but only when I'm inspired (God, I can be pretentious sometimes).

I believe that, like Religion, mix tapes are very personal things. When you listen to one you hear something completely different from anyone else. I often feel pained when someone is listening to one of my mixes and they skip over a song. Those two songs are supposed to be next to one another. I put them together for a reason. If you skip over it, you will lose the effect entirely. Oh well, they will never understand my mix tapes.

Huh. Maybe there is a reason why Qwark always calls me the female version of Rob Gordon. Anyway, the whole point of this is to tell you to check out a cool NPR article, which every misunderstood tape mixer should read. Enjoy.

My Current Mix Tape:

"Stars and Sons" Broken Social Scence
"Quizas, Quizas, Quizas" Nat King Cole
"Seeing Other People" Belle and Sebastian
"Slow Hands" Interpol
"(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear" Blondie
"Reduced to One" Eyes Like Knives
"I'll Be Your Mirror" Velvet Underground
"Rebellion (Lies)" Arcade Fire
"My Eyes Are Green" Erykah Badu
"This Charming Man" The Smiths
"I'm Leaving It All Up To You" La Vern Baker and Ben E. King
"Wild Horses" The Rolling Stones
"Brass In Pocket" The Pretenders
"Somewhere In Texas" The Ravonettes
"Someday We'll Be Together" The Supremes
"Season of the Witch" Donovan
"Just Like Heaven" The Cure

Also, I'm kind of obsessed with Arcade Fire right now and not just because their album is the exact length of my commute.