“I bet I made at least 50 mixtapes in high school,” one friend told me when I asked if she ever got into making them. “I would spend hours working on each one. It was one of my favorite hobbies as a teenager.” Another friend remembered making a mixtape for a new boyfriend, and the sequence of the songs was a huge deal. “The third or maybe the fourth song was about him, but I couldn’t put that song first — that was too serious for a new relationship!”
In an age when our playlists can be automatically generated based on the songs, artists, and genres we listen to the most, the idea of compiling songs taken from multiple sources and recording them on a cassette tape — to express our mood or match a theme — sounds archaic. But there’s just something about a physical tape, or in my case, a mix CD since cassette tapes were out and CDs were in by the time I was making playlists. They were a real, tangible declaration of who you were and what you felt.
But of course, not all mixtapes and CDs carried that much weight. The low-stakes ones of my youth were for the holidays, and we’d play them during big family dinners and get-togethers. Classics like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song,” and Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” were on my Christmas 2004 mix CD.
I also remember making one my junior year in high school and picking all the songs my friends and I listened to the most that year, like The Black Eyed Peas’s “Where Is The Love?” and Ashanti’s “Happy.” There were also the mix CDs we made for pregame warmups during basketball season. The songs had to be just the right mix to get us pumped for the game. Think “1, 2 Step” by Ciara and Missy Elliott — we felt so cool!
Along with music, there was another form of expression when it came to mixtapes. “We’d write the song list in those colorful gel pens. There were always hearts and flowers and doodles all over the labels,” my friend reminisced. I remember discovering colorful CD cases, and I never went back to a clear case after that.
So I’m curious: if you made them, what songs did you put on your mixtapes or CDs? Any fun memories to share? Who/what did you make them for? A crush? Best friend? Middle school dance?
And for your enjoyment and/or inspiration, here are popular Valentine’s Day playlists — Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube.
(Top photo of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, and second photo by Leandriod.)