So you’re thinking you wanna make a tape, right? You’re sitting in your bedroom that’s covered in pictures of rock stars you tore out of magazines, staring out the window, you just finished reading a book by Hank Rollins or someone like that and you are feeling like, man, I am so alone in my intense abyss of deep pain, and no one could possibly understand what I’m going through…except maybe that really cute girl that wears the crusty Clash t-shirt all the time. Hell fuckin’ yeah. She’d understand you! You could share your teenage angst with her and probably get laid while you’re at it. But you have to find a way to let her know how you feel. So you make her a mix tape. (By the way, dude, if you listen to mostly popular music, don’t even bother making a tape. Anyone can just turn on the radio and hear that shit, so what’s the point?)
If this is the first time you’ve ever made a mix tape, you’re going to need some help. Otherwise you’ll just make dozens of crappy tapes before you get one good one, and I definitely wish someone had given me advice like this before I made my first mix, cos then I wouldn’t have been making tapes full of Stone Temple Pilots songs for all those years before I finally made a good tape. Don’t worry, though, I’m an expert at this point, so I’m going to help you out.
The first thing you should know, is that there are a lot of different kinds of mix tapes – tapes to listen to while driving your car (you know, the kind of songs that make you pound your hands on the dash and sing along real loud, and roll your windows down so everyone you pass can hear the awesome songs), tapes to give your best friend to remind them of you, tapes of songs all about one theme, like drinking or fucking. But the kind of mix tape I’m going to tell you how to make is the most difficult and maybe the most rewarding kind of tape to put together – a tape that will get your crushperson to want to make out with you, or at the very least, hang out with you.
Technically, you only need a few things to make the tape, but they’re all very important.
1. A notebook - perhaps your old, worn-out journal covered in shiny stickers for favorite bands, pages torn out from passing notes to friends, secret stories and love poems scribbled in the margins.
2. A pen that writes nicely, maybe some weird color like green or pink, or if you want to be able to erase things, you can use a pencil.
4. A blank audiocassette tape. Ninety minutes.
Don’t use a CD. If you use a CD, the listener can skip past the tracks they don’t like and the thing about a mix is, if the songs fit together well, it’s about the whole experience. It’s not just a bunch of random songs thrown together, you have to hear all the songs in the specific order they were placed on the tape to really understand it. Besides. If you make the mix on CD, you can’t put on any songs that you have on record, and all your best music is on vinyl anyway – right?
And please, please, use a ninety-minute tape. Sixty-minute tapes are chintzy. It’s like you didn’t care enough to give them the extra half hour of music. Plus, you’ll have so much you want to put on there that there’s no way you could fit it all in only an hour. Also, don’t use anything longer than ninety minutes. You don’t want to overwhelm them. Once I made a crush a 110-minute mix, and when I asked them what they thought, they said: “Oh, it was pretty cool. I didn’t listen to the whole thing, though, I think I stopped it in the middle of the second side.” So they missed all the magnificent music that was still after that! I never made that mistake again.
5. Your record collection (and by “record collection,” I mean all your music – CDs, tapes, records, anything.)
After you get all that stuff together, you’ll look up at the words you scrawled in black permanent marker across the white-painted walls of your teenage bedroom. Something like: “I hate myself and want to die,” or “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” You’ll contemplate them, take a swig of coffee or tea or something. You’ll take a deep breath, and get ready to pick out the songs.
Obviously you know who you’re making the tape for. You kinda need to picture them while you’re picking out the songs. Imagine them listening to the end result, the way they’ll react. Think of emo Max, blushing when you hand him the tape, his scruffy hair (that somehow manages to be long and short at the same time) hanging in his eyes. He’ll blush and look down at his shoes, the scuffed black Dr. Martens that he’s had for years, the ones he got before he was vegan. Or think of handing the tape to punk rock Kizzy with her stick-and-poke tattoos and shaved head. She’ll jump up and down and say: “Fuck yeah! Thank you! This rocks!”
With that image in mind, start deciding what songs you want on the tape. Jot them down in your journal. Since you’re using a ninety-minute tape, you can probably fit around thirty-two songs on it – sixteen on each side. Sometimes you can fit more songs than that, if they’re all really short (like, if you’re a big fan of blistering thirty-second songs by bands like Descendents); fewer songs if they’re all really long. But generally, thirty-two is a good number to estimate.
So, you’ve got your notebook out, you’re ready to make a list of the songs that will be gracing the tape. There are four kinds of songs that need to go on this tape. I don’t mean musical genres, or even themes – I mean there are four specific purposes you need songs for when making a mix tape for your crush, and each song should fulfill at least one of them. They are:
1. Songs to impress your crushperson. These songs should be gleaned from the hippest records in your record collection. They are basically like the musical equivalent of saying: “Hey, check out how cool I am. If only you would hang out with me, you too could be as cool.” Only not in a snobby way.
Some of my personal favorite songs to impress with? Anything by The Pixies that’s not too obvious – try something like “The Sad Punk.” Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” is a good song. Maybe Kathleen Hanna singing “I Wish I Was Him” – because then you’re referencing a whole bunch of stuff with that one song – it’s Kathleen Hanna singing a song written by Ben Lee about Evan Dando. Score. You could also slip in something by one of your very favorite bands, but not one of their most known tracks – if you have any bootlegs, this is a good place to use them. If all else fails, try something by Television or the Velvet Underground. It works every time.
2. Songs that say a lot about you. Your favorite songs. Some of them will probably overlap with the songs you need to impress your crush, and some of them won’t – some of them will be the dorkiest songs in your collection. Put them on the tape anyway. This will show that you’re not afraid of appearing uncool, that you don’t give a shit what other people think. (Which isn’t true, cos otherwise you wouldn’t be making this tape…but the goal is to look like you don’t care what other people think.) They’re also a way to give your crushperson a glimpse into your soul, so they’ll get to know you better.
I can’t speak for you, because I only know the songs that say a lot about me, but I’ll let you know what they are, because maybe that will help give you some idea of what you should be looking for. To tell my crush about who I really was, I’d slide in a couple of real dorky but old-favorite songs of mine, like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper or “Fight Like a Brave” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I’d even put some Nirvana on there, who cares that they were sell-outs? Probably something off In Utero. I’d put on an Ani DiFranco song, definitely. There would be Black Flag, and Bikini Kill, The Pogues and Naked Raygun and Patti Smith, of course Patti Smith – most likely “Pissing In a River.”
3. Songs you think they would like. Again, some of these might overlap with the above two categories. A large portion of the tape should be filled with this kind of song. You take what you know about their musical tastes, and based on that, you should come up with some songs/bands that you think they would enjoy. Also included in this category, are songs that mention some theme/topic/place/whatever that you’ve talked about with your crush. This will show you’re sensitive and really listen to what they have to say, and know a lot about them.
Say you’re making a tape for punk rock Kizzy who is fierce and has her septum pierced. This is where you put all your hardcore grrrl-punk songs, growly and punk as fuck like she is – bands like Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill, The Lunachicks, maybe even some L7 or 7 Year Bitch. And you’ll remember that she told you how she’s bipolar and has to be on psychiatric meds for it, so you’ll put on some songs like “Manic Depression” by Throwing Muses, or “That Prozac Moment” by the Mr. T Experience.
Or you’re making a tape for emo Max who is shy and sensitive (or at least you think he’s sensitive, maybe you’ll find out later that he’s not, but that’s another story…) and wears clothing that doesn’t quite fit and all those other things that an emo boy should be. You know he’s vegan, so straight off you want to put a song like “Meat Is Murder” by The Smiths. And you’ll definitely want to include bands like Sonic Youth to show how you’re experimental like he is, or some Rites of Spring and Jawbreaker cos you know where the roots of emo come from and you know he likes those bands.
4. And finally…lurve songs. This one’s tricky. You don’t want to overdo it. Absolutely do not under any circumstances make a tape filled completely with love, lust, or crush songs for your crush – you can do this for them later, once you know they like you back. If you make a tape of love songs for your crush, they will think you are obsessed with them, and get scared off. You do not want that. You just want enough of this kind of song to hint to your crushperson that you like them.
Try something along the lines of “Totally” by Screeching Weasel. Maybe you can even throw on something kinda sexy, such as “Journey to the Center of a Girl” by The Cramps or even “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Iggy and the Stooges. After all, the point of this tape is to seduce them. But no matter how tempted you are, do not include the song “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths. I know you really want to, but you are not at the stage in your relationship where you can give your crush a song that basically tells them you want to die by their side. It’s just too creepy. I know this from experience.
Scared yet? Don’t be. It sounds ridiculously complicated, but really, it’s not. You’ll know what songs should go on the tape – it will come naturally.
Okay. So you know what songs are going on the tape. Queue up the first one, press “record,” and make the magic happen.
About halfway through making the tape, you will have a panic attack. You’re just sitting there, pulling bits of crud out of your carpet, it’s raining outside and you’re kinda depressed anyway (what were you thinking, no matter what you do your crushperson will never like you), you’re drinking coffee which is probably not a good idea cos the thick, steaming brown liquid always makes you anxious, but you can’t help it, you need something to drink and you love coffee…and suddenly you freak out. “Shit!” you’ll think, “What the hell is wrong with me? This tape is total crap! Max (or Kizzy or Rat or Gabriel or Tim or Imogene or whatever their name is this time…) will hate it! What the fuck. I should just give up now.” Don’t give up. You’ve already gotten halfway through the tape, backing out now would be silly. You need to relax. If you live on your own, you can light up a cigarette, and once the first few drags have calmed you down, you can continue making the tape. If you still live with one or both of your parents (which you probably do, most tapes of this nature are made in lonely teenage bedrooms), you can either take a break from the tape to go somewhere and smoke, or you can blow the smoke discreetly out your bedroom window into the rainy March day and burn a shitload of coconut incense and hope you don’t get caught. Actually, if you do get caught, that’ll give you something else to talk about with your crush. When the two of you are sitting together at some diner sometime, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, you can say: “Yeah, I got caught smoking, my mom had a fit, but I don’t care, I’ll do what I want.” Or you can say: “God, my parents are such fucking fascist hypocrites. They both smoke, but when they found out I do, you’d think I killed someone!”
If you don’t smoke, find some other way to relax. You know what calms you down.
Once you’re done with the making of the tape, all you need to do is make a cover. You can create some sort of collage of pictures, something really meaningful or artsy that you tore out of a zine or something. Or, if you’re artistically inclined, you can draw the cover yourself. Then write up the track listing – you can handwrite it, which gives it a very sweet, personal touch, like a letter; you can type it on a typewriter which makes it look really hip and old-school because it’s the in thing for everyone to use typewriters these days; or you can type it on a computer, which gives it the best readability, and you can play around with fonts. It’s your call.
That’s it! Congratulations, you’ve finished the tape. You’ve typed out the track listing, put some sort of cool image on the cassette cover, listened to it once through to make extra sure it doesn’t suck. Now you have to complete the most difficult step of all, but the one that will make the whole thing worth it; the one that will give reason to all those hours spent alone in your room pressing “record” and “stop.” You have to give the tape to the person you made it for. If you hesitate too much, you’ll end up wussing out. So you just gotta do it right away, like tearing off a Band-Aid. Next time you see your crush, say: “Hey, I’ve got something for you.” Then hand them the tape. They’ll smile, thank you, maybe look at the ground all cute and shy and tell you they’re sorry they don’t have anything to give you. Say: “Ah, that’s okay, it was no big deal, I had fun making it.” Then wait. Wait for them to listen to the tape. They’ll call you, they’ll want to kiss you, and if you’re lucky – maybe they’ll even make you one.
(-originally written in 2003; it has appeared in many different forms in various zines and books since then.)
