I'm just making you mixtapes with homemade covers.
I was texting recently with an old friend1 from back home who’s recently gotten off social media so now we text if we want to share a podcast or whatever. It’s kind of nice and it got me thinking back to the olden days when my friends and I used to write each other actual letters! On paper! They were complex and elaborately decorated and sometimes came with a a mix tape, the ultimate gift of friendship and a labor of love.
If you are young enough to have never made a mix tape let me explain that it was a whole process, nothing like today’s playlist creations where you can just scan an endless list of songs that you don’t even have to own and peeble stream it on joop or whatever it is the kids do today. No, we had to physically own the music, then curate the perfect playlist of songs to convey whatever message we wanted to send. Then we had to play/record tape-to-tape which was a pain in the ass. Finally, we’d decorate the cover/liner notes because this was an art project, not just a playlist. Hell, Tift Merritt wrote a whole song about it!
The same friend I referenced above is well known for making amazing mix tapes that later became yearly CDs mixes and now Spotify playlists. It happened so quickly, this transition from the physical to the virtual.
When I got my first apartment2 in the mid-90s I didn’t even have a telephone3 because I couldn’t afford the $95 deposit to the phone company. Instead, I borrowed a pager from my boss and would run over to the corner store to use the payphone to call people back. What a time.
Now, obviously this was very much not great and I don’t recommend living alone in the city without a way to call for help, but things were so much simpler back then. I wrote letters, I listened to music, I read a lot. I watched a lot of movies because I worked at a movie theater and they were free. Sometimes I was bored, which was okay. Sometimes I smoked a bowl with a friend, ate 7-Eleven snacks, and watched Melrose Place. The 90s was a good time to be young and broke.
You made plans with people in person or over the phone and then just showed up and hoped they did too. You went out every night (every night) because that was the only way to catch up with your friends and you didn’t want to miss anything.
There is almost no photographic/video evidence of my existence from that time because nobody carried a little camera around in their pocket. There were also (thankfully) no online blogs on which to rant about my debilitating crush on the hot guy in the leather jacket, just physical diaries that I still have in my possession but I’m scared to read because the cringe might actually kill me4.
When blogs did become a thing I was old enough to have some restraint and lucky enough not get myself fired over what I wrote. I loved writing personal stories for an unknown audience, first on Diaryland, then on Blogger and now here. I loved the Internet for connection and have made some excellent friends, many of whom became my real-life friends.
Now we get to social media. When Facebook was new it felt harmless - kind of dorky and fun. You just followed your friends, overshared, and hoped your mother didn’t discover it5. Instagram in it’s infancy was nice because it was simple - just photos with terrible filters. No fake AI photos, no rage bait, no oddly compelling videos of people eating weird fruit. I loved it and now I resent it and know it’s rotting my brain but I can’t seem to stop.
My algorithm keeps showing me the weirdest, most disturbing stuff. Yes, mountain biking, yes, fashion inspiration, yes, clips of Hugh Grant being grumpy, but also weirdly exploitive reels that I don’t even want to describe because they’re listening, y’all. THEY ARE LISTENING. The creepy dweebs that run this shit are trying to distract us and make us dumb and it’s working.
I keep trying to click on the “not interested” button for content that makes me uncomfortable but it turns out there is SO MUCH MORE OUT THERE that makes me uncomfortable. There’s just an endless amount of uncomfortable online and somebody is making money off it and it’s not me.
I worry about the kids who’ve never known any different, who’ve never lived in a world without social media, who’ve never had to just be bored, have never not have a phone or tablet at the ready. I hope they all rise up and turn against it. Somewhere deep in our lizard brains we’re not ready for this level of constant mis/information. Like, sure it’s nice to have literally a million songs in your pocket but isn’t it more satisfying to have the physical thing? A record with liner notes is way cooler, is all I’m saying.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with all of this (and I still have my Apple Music account to be sure) but things that once seemed harmless and fun are now being weaponized against us and it’s starting to freak me out. I just want to make a mix tape and hang out with my friends in person. Who’s with me?
When I say “old” I mean we went to preschool together. Seriously.
$200 a month for an efficiency apartment with a murphy bed!
I will say, sometimes I miss a good landline. I miss hanging up on people! It was so gloriously physical.
Or should I publish excerpts here? The cringe might be good enough to share now that I think about it.
Oh, she did, y’all.
Oh, mixtapes, how I miss thee! I made a lot, some by recording *off the radio* and trying to avoid commercials and voice over interruption. Sometimes I had to try several times to get one song (which can end up being a lot of time glued to a radio with a tape deck!) I also made tapes of vinyl, since then the albums were portable. Still have a few of those mixtapes (and a tape deck that works!) We had an 8 track player in our car when I was growing up; that thing was great.
I've gotta say, I am slightly bitter about having to convert music from vinyl to cassette, to CD, then mp3, and now the whole streaming mess. Just pick something and stick with it already. I like physical things that can't be taken away from me by the tech overlords. (Why I've been buying DVD sets of things I love, although I recognize the basic danger of this given how finicky DVD players and the DVDs themselves can be. VHS was in some ways better because it was sturdier).
I was saying to someone the other day that cassettes were just so much sturdier than CDs. They could be unwound, rewound, and basically work, even if the tape got cut, you could splice it and barely notice the jump. As long as the magnetization was good, they took a beating and kept on playing. CDs, you look them wrong and they're like, 'oh my feelings are hurt and I'll never play for you again.' I like to think of cassettes as the GenXers of the playable music world.
Ha!
Growing up then was a blessing because we were experiencing life in a way that felt freer, simpler, and more connected in the most genuine ways. Afternoons were spent outside until the streetlights came on, riding bikes and knocking on friends’ doors instead of sending a text. Music was something you saved up for—buying a tape and memorizing every lyric, reading the liner notes like they held secrets. TV shows were events, not something to binge; if you missed an episode, you had to wait for a rerun. Friendships thrived on long phone calls, passing notes in class, and showing up for each other, not just reacting to posts. There was a thrill in developing film and flipping through the glossy prints, never knowing exactly how a photo would turn out. Even with that, there is generally not a lot of photographic history of it escapades, which makes reminiscing a creative memory lap. Life had a natural patience to it—no instant notifications, no curated feeds, just moments lived fully and memories made without the need to prove them to anyone else. It was a time when boredom sparked creativity, and the world felt big, waiting to be explored in person, not just through a screen.