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By Brenda Shaughnessy Submitted by Kirk, Blender-Keeper Date: 2015 Jul 27 Comment on this Work [[2015.07.27.13.07.10257]] |
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"Think of the tender things that we were working on." – Simple Minds Such a delicious pain in the ass to make, on a double deck if you were lucky, otherwise you had to drop the needle onto the precise groove as your left index hit PLAY/RECORD, taking all afternoon or many. Mistakes, thinking too hard about what you wanted to tell the person but couldn't say any other way. It was always "I love you," didn't you know? Mix tape: private language, lost art, first book, cri de coeur, x-ray, diary. An exquisitely direct and sweet misunderstanding. We weren't fluent yet but we lived in its nation, tense and sweaty for an anthem. Receiving a mixtape could be major, depending on from who; giving one to someone in public was a dilemma. You had to practice. Would you say, nonchalantly, "Oh, here, I made you a mixtape?" By the lockers? In class? Ugh! But giving it over in private could be worse, especially arranging it. You never picked the best song off the album, definitely not the hit single. The deeper the cut the deeper buried your feelings for that person. You didn't know? Not all lovesongs, though-- that would make you seem obsessed, boring. They should know you're fun and also funny and dark-hearted and, importantly, unpredictable. A "Blasphemous Rumours" for every "Only You." And sexy! Though not Prince's moaners--not "Erotic City," not "Darling Nikki"! But what? Not top 40, stylish, with a sly angle, 70s funk, some Stevie Wonder, like you've got background you don't really have. As it records, you have to listen to each song in its entirety, and in this way you hear your favorite song with the ears of your intended, as they hear it, new. This was the best feeling of your young life. Then the cold chill of suddenly hearing in your 3rd favorite INXS song a lyric you'd break out in hives over if you thought they thought you thought that about them when they heard it: (there's something about you, girl, that makes me sweat). The only thing worse was the tape running out a full minute before the end of "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out." You never got it right, not even once. That was part of the mixtape's charm, to your dismay. Did it ever win you love? You never fell for anyone else's mix either. Sometimes cool, mostly was just someone else's music in a case dense with tiny handwriting to get all those titles in. So much desire in those squeezed-in letters. Not "love me!" so much as "listen to me! Listen to me always!" So that's really it, right? Maybe you thought someday you'd make a mixtape that your splendid friend, your lucky star, your seventh stranger, would take a pen to, punching in the little plastic tabs which meant, as you well know, it could never be taped over again. They'd never use your mixtape to make another mixtape, to give away or to copy a friend's album they didn't like enough to buy, joining all the ok tapes in caddies stacked up a wall or thrown in the backseat of the Datsun, then in moving boxes, stored in parents' garages, 5 for a buck at a yard sale, buried in landfill, or, saddest of all, discarded on the street, purple script still aswirl on the white label FOR YOU-- JUST BECUZ. Shiny brown ribbon tangled, strangled, never again to play out what had to be said just that way. |