The Scene: Mixtapes
I’m not sure how I got here. I wish I could tell you, but I couldn’t. The six-and-a-half-hour New Year’s Eve mixes. The live session bootlegs. Acid jazz. Turntablism. I fell into the rabbit hole. Let me tell you about it.
I guess it all started in the seventh grade. My Uncle John — an insurance agent, in Baltimore — sent me two compact discs: “Keep It Unreal” and “Trouser Jazz” by an obscure English DJ, Mr Scruff. All of the sudden, everything else I heard didn’t matter. The Beatles, Linkin Park — they had nothing on this guy. He had the nerve to rap about the plight of the medieval peasantry, to stitch together audiobooks into rambling sing-alongs about whale sightseeing and the fishing industry. I knew every word, where every beat would drop. It was bizarre and redundant and so, so totally great. But it was the start of something even better.
I got through the phase of learning those albums back to front. I had gotten a hand-me-down iPod. I started to catch up with my friends’ musical tastes. “Champagne Nibbler” would turn up on shuffle, and I’d chuckle, and listen, but it would also stir something. And then the other shoe dropped. The day I was handed a scratched, homemade copy of DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing.” I realized I could not resist any longer. My parents gave me an old computer, and I surfed around for hours looking for mashups. Some of them were brilliant and elegant, wrapping guitar leads around lyrics never meant to be together, while others crudely and crassly threw together beats — just to have done it first. I grew accustomed to blank stares when I put music on in my car — I even began to enjoy them.
It was online where I could enjoy the process of finding, listening and collecting to the fullest. Before I knew it, I was part of a community. The fateful day when someone tweets the link to his first mixtape. Secret pages where artists post unreleased tracks and plug up-and-comers. The sheer, improbable joy of recognizing the faint overtones of a Radiohead song announcing the next track. Nerds, all of us, we felt cool. We had our own music, ranging from German techno to old-school vinyl scratching, and everyone had their own specific preferences, their all-time-favorite beats.
And being nerds, we grabbed onto the latest tools as fast as we could. All of a sudden, we could clumsily emulate our gods — kids staging a Christmas pageant for their parents, pre-teens in at a recital trying to play Mozart. We’re all awful. I was practically jumping up and down in my seat the first time I got to DJ in a Turntable.fm “room.” Everyone hated me, and I loved it.
It’s a special kind of geek that gets misty-eyed listening to the latest Amon Tobin album, or that giggle when a soul song gets scratched into a shuffle. It’s a guilty pleasure to listen to the goofy or borderline insane things that people put together online. But in the face of Spotify publishing to Facebook and nearly everything else becoming social, it’s nice to turn back into seventh graders and get back in touch with the silly, the juvenile, the geeky and the fun.
Matt Policastro is a staff writer for the Voice. He can be reached for comment at MPolicastro13@wooster.edu