A Vicarious Incantation: The Love-Letter Mixtape

There are several genres and many subgenres of the mixtape, in the conventional sense of that word—by which I mean: a cassette of a homemade sound collage, usually consisting of songs by various artists. The connotative meaning generally includes: a recording of a painstakingly curated compilation of songs, and possibly also what we might call non-diegetic adjuncts, such as sound-bites from movies and miscellaneous other sources. These songs and sounds are dubbed piecemeal onto a cassette tape, which is usually then given to a friend, or to an acquaintance, or a stranger you would like to know better by offering them a sampling of your tastes and sensibilities. In this last example, the mixtape is an epistolary narrative that contains—among many other things—a composite and inferential self-portrait. You make them in order to impress and be understood. These are what I call Introductory Mixtapes.

Other genres and subgenres of mixtape are more occasional, such as the Road-Trip Tape. The Breakup Tape. The Jogging Tape. The tape you leave in the mailbox of the ex who won’t return your calls. The tape you make for your little sister, after she gets fired from her job tearing tickets at the multiplex. I have been given mixtapes intended to be played in my Walkman while I ride my bicycle, usually a composite of power-chord punk ballads at 180 bpm, turning a trip to meet a friend for coffee into an attack on the night. I have been given mixtapes specifically to listen to while high, tapes that inevitably include one of those tracks where a pathway of reverb and delay pedals on the concrete floor of somebody’s garage is still turning a human and their Telecaster into an unspooling strata of overlapping stereophonic sound, hairy with tendrils that embrace you with warm undulation. (It is important to note the bodily aspect: Tape-givers want you to feel something that they have felt within themselves.) Many tapes are made for personal use, but often they are made to be given. Hearing the words Here, I made a tape for you, is both touching and enthralling, and the first private listen can be like a view into another life, like seeing into a stranger’s windows at night.

It must be noted that genre classification is not always straightforward. Mixtapes are collages, but they are texts, not works of art per se, because form and content are of secondary importance when it comes to categorization. The selected music, other sounds, and the way everything is stitched together, all matter less than the intersection of the author’s intention and the recipient’s recognition of that intention. Perhaps for this reason, my most beloved genre of mixtape is the platonic, non-occasional tape. The Just Because Tape. Unburdened. The kind you make for a friend, for no particular reason. You just hand it to them with no expectation other than the hope that they listen without prejudice. Such good-faith cassettes—spontaneous and generous, unburdened from the exchange rates of romantic design—unite a tape-maker with their desire to please. To conjure joy. The maker has demonstrated that they were thinking deeply about you while you were not around. Momentarily, the closeness of your friendship is held hostage to fortune, because they have wagered that they understand some of the ways in which you relate to the world, or that there are things they know which you will appreciate. Maybe they just want you to laugh at the throughline of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” following Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars” following “I Never Talk to Strangers” by Bette Midler and Tom Waits. But as far as risks go, such tapes are pretty safe, practically guaranteed to receive a modicum of appreciation, and the joy of discovery.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: The Love-Letter Mixtape. This genre receives such an outsized measure of attention in popular literature and film, that those unversed in the craft are forgiven for believing it was the dominant species of mixtape...