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“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do,” says Rob Fleming in the best-selling novel, High Fidelity. Nick Hornby’s 35-year-old protagonist runs London record store Championship Vinyl and spends his days compiling ‘top-five’ lists that allow him to demonstrate his superior knowledge of pop culture. If the novel was published today instead of in 1995, Rob Fleming would be the kind of man to send you a 2,000 word essay on Hinge explaining why he doesn’t use Spotify, before ghosting you because he is too busy licking his record player clean to find the time to ask you a single question.
In this new column ‘I made you this mixtape… But then this journalist ripped it to shreds’ I’ll be trying to get to the bottom of what makes a good mixtape. I’ll create a portrait of each mixtape creator, judging them for their choices — aesthetic and musical — and like any good critic, I’ll give the mixtape an arbitrary rating out of 10 which tells you nothing more than how much of the tracklist I actually recognised. If you’re lucky, I’ll tell you what little I do know about the songs and artists featured — and you can listen along at home, thanks to the playlist I’ll include with each column. But mostly, it’ll just be a whimsical study of the human psyche.
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Submit a mixtape for consideration
If you’d like to submit a mixtape for consideration (there’s no need to send me the physical mixtape), you can send me an email on beth.kirkbride@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter (@BettyKirkers) — I can pay you £5 for photos of the album, album artwork, and tracklist and this gives me the non-refundable rights to roast your former flame.
You can be anonymous if you want (bearing in mind there’s every possibility this column will be the next Modern Love and your ex will realise you still have the mixtape they made you when you were 14) — or I can include links to your socials at the bottom of each piece if you’d like the clout.
