“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.
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.
The retro revival
“But no one even makes mixtapes anymore, Beth,” I hear you say. Well, precisely. Making a mixtape — on a cassette or a CD rom — is a painstaking process. The generation that actually made mixtapes had all grown up and moved out of their parents’ houses, but then coronavirus upended our lives and we found ourselves back in our childhood bedrooms surrounded by all our old things. When I moved back in with my parents at the tail-end of 2020, I found myself picking through boxes of stuff I hadn’t touched since I last lived at home, aged 18. As I dug through the swimming certificates, gymnastic badges and ticket stubs that I’d kept for no discernible reason, I came across some old mixtapes, gifted by former flames and random internet strangers alike.
Nowadays you can drag and drop songs into a Spotify playlist and send your beau the link saying “hey listen to this”, feigning nonchalance. If they don’t like it — or worse still, they totally ignore the efforts you went to share your music taste with them — you can just brush it off. But with a mixtape, there’s no way to play it cool: the second you hand it over, your heart is in their hands. They’re incredibly sentimental for precisely this reason: as physical artefacts, they’re a reminder of a time where somebody thought you were worthy of attention, or perhaps even love. That’s what makes them so great, but it’s also what makes them incredibly cringy.
The good old days
As I held these portals into the past in my hands, I cringed as I wondered whether the recipients of my carefully cultivated compilations had also held onto the mixtapes I’d given them. Had they been unearthed by their new partner, when possessions were packed up and they prepared to move into their first home together? Did they find their way to charity shops, or car boot sales? Were they gifted to a younger sibling? Are they sitting in a car glove box, collecting dust? Did they get tossed straight in the bin after we stopped speaking? Or, more likely, are they sitting in a box at their parents’ house because, like me, they just couldn’t bring themselves to throw them away?
Pictures of you
Does listening to a mixtape created by a relative stranger give you any sense of who that person is? Or, rather, does it simply tell you how they wanted to be seen? Does the type of music included on the tracklist locate the mixtape at a precise moment in time? What do the liner notes — or lack thereof — tell you about the creator’s strength of feeling? Are they a tortured, artistic soul? A boy in a band? Or were they just trying to get in your pants?
If you’d like to find out the answer to all these questions, make sure you subscribe to Ripped To Shreds.
In the meantime, tell your friends!