Remember in school, when you scrambled together feverish mixtapes for friends, hoping they’d think you were cool and that they wouldn’t hurt you? Remember how vulnerable you felt as you handed over the cassette, complete with painstaking inlay card track listing and cool stickers? When I was 15, Andy Maclennan snuck me a mixtapein the buspark before school, and I blushed bright red, knowing he’d spent at least two hours of his time putting it together. The tracks included Clubbed to Death, Monster by Henry Rollins, and a track by Led Zeppelin that buzzed the heck out of my dad’s car speakers on our summer holidays that year. I recently found a drawer full of tapes at home, all scrawled with finepoint and biro- “SMASHING PUMPKINS SAVED MY LIFE” and “I heart Marylin Manson”. These days, we kid ourselves that there is no need to archive the music we want to share into a physical format, thinking it’s all at our fingertips to listen to in digital deluxe whenever we want. Less and less value is placed in the artefact, and that encourages a lack of respect for the artists who make the music we listen to. It’s freely available, downloadable, copiable and instantly deletable, and that’s why, I think, it’s underappreciated. All hail the mixtape! Fuzzy, smudged, brittle and easily corrupted, cassette tapes are a beautiful way to share music, because they really do need taking care of, they are as fragile as the notes they carry, and they take time to put together. Subnav.com know this, and that’s why they’ve made an online platform (a nod to the digital age), where DJs, musicians, soundsystems and artists can share their mixtapes with the world. Check out the latest offering from the wonderful Slobodan- he describes it as “the soundtrack to a perpetual war”.
