Of Dates and Disco Balls, Mixtapes and Modernism

hen I was a kid, we were making mixtapes the way they were meant to be made: with cassette tapes.

You recorded to a cassette in real-time, pulling tracks from other cassettes or the radio, and it became a skill to avoid the commercials and DJs. Once you had all your songs, meticulously ordered, you decorated the tape and its cover and made your liner notes. Everything about making a cassette mixtape was governed by harsh creative restrictions; the kind that feel limiting but ultimately result in a superior product. When you gave that special someone your mixtape with a sheepish grin and a clumsy, “Hey, I made you this,” it literally represented hours of your life condensed into a little box, a true physical manifestation of emotion.

Cassette mixtapes were the perfect metaphors for love: they took equal parts passion and patience to make; they felt indestructible in the beginning but could seriously degrade over time if not taken care of; they seemed simple but were oh-so-complex.

By the time I was a teenager, we were downloading songs from Napster and burning CDs. We were still calling them mixtapes even though that name didn’t really make sense anymore. It was an easy process, nothing more than dragging little pictures across a glowing screen and letting the magical, whizbang lasers do their work. No more than 20 minutes, tops, and even that rapidly decreased in the years that followed.

You could instantly skip to the songs you liked or over the songs you didn’t. You could shuffle the tracks at will once you got tired of the order the creator put them in. There was no more intermission as you switched sides. But you also had to hold discs by the edges, gently, to make sure you wouldn’t get fingerprints on the shiny side with all the data, and you didn’t dare set that side down on a surface. You couldn’t slip a CD mixtape in your pocket and take it with you. It was a big, shiny, delicate circle that drastically improved sound quality, but removed much of the romanticism.

In high school, we were swapping flash drives with entire discographies on them. Mixtapes were all but dead, replaced by playlists that could be made in a couple minutes and had all the sentimentality of giving someone a stick of chewing gum. Even if you put the same amount of thought and care into a playlist as you would a cassette mixtape, you just couldn’t get around the fact that there was nothing special about a playlist.

A playlist is a fractured reality, one that can be reshaped at will and gone in a flash, as though it never existed at all. It’s nothing more than an idea, not something you can hold, or touch, or feel, and as such, it can be forgotten. A cassette mixtape (or a CD mixtape) is permanent. Even if it shatters into a thousand pieces and is completely unplayable, it still exists in a thousand beautiful plastic pieces. A playlist can disappear in an imaginary puff of cyber-smoke.

A couple months into my freshman year of college, iTunes 8 introduced a button called “Genius” that would instantly make a playlist for you. You could specify how long it should be, what genre, what era, etc.

A computer simulation of a human expression of emotion.

But for everything my generation has been blessed with, we’ve been given all the consistency of a broken home. Technology has advanced faster in the 21 years that I’ve been alive than ever before in human history. We live in exciting times, for sure, but we lack the clear identity all past generations have had.

Mixtapes evolved into irrelevance. Photography went from Polaroids to disposable film to digital to becoming a requisite that all phones take HD photos and videos and instantly upload them to the Internet. Computers have gone from archaic, unwieldy machines to futuristic tablets we carry around with us, touching and tapping and swiping and sliding and pinching and pulling. Even the paper book, one of our oldest forms of communication, is now facing its slow, inevitable death at the hands of devices that can conjure up digital books from thin air.

y room at my parent’s house is a graveyard of obsolescence: dusty boxes filled with VHS tapes and thick, heavy dictionaries, old magazines and action figures. Sifting through it all recently to find an old mixtape was enough to remind me why I used to go through a mid-life crisis every couple of years as a kid. As much as I love the rapid evolution of technology to see what crazy new innovation is coming down the pipeline, it scares the shit out of me.

How long is the average lifespan? Like 80 years? Let’s say 80 years. I’ve gone through a quarter of that already. And in that quarter, I’ve amassed a greater variety of antiquated technology than my parents have in almost 60 years.

I’m still pretty young, but I feel ancient.

More than anything though, what defines my generation for me is the evolution of dating. It’s been a much subtler shift than mixtapes or photos, but just as radical. My generation is stuck between the formalities of yesteryear and the casual techno-flirting of tomorrow. We grew up being told to expect Disney princesses courted by Disney princes, Valentine’s Day roses, and awkward meetings with her dad whenever we pick her up. What we got instead was texting, sexting, Facebook Chat, and just hanging out in her room, watching Netflix and making out.

When we were children, we were told that going to her window at night, blasting love songs from a boombox, was romantic; that carrying around a picture of your crush was cute; that making a mixtape for someone you like was a cool way of letting them know. Now, in an age dominated by a fear of “Facebook stalking” and a hypersensitivity to anything that could possibly be perceived as “creepy,” all those gestures seem insane. You can’t even call someone on the phone anymore without being judged as too forward.

Courting today involves either a) pretending you don’t like the person you really like, hoping that will make them interested in you, or b) getting drunk at a party and having sloppy sex. Often both.

“Courting.” Even the word sounds antiquated.

Belle never had to deal with drunk texts from Gaston or Facebook pokes from the Beast, and so we as a society never really developed what any of those stupid gestures actually mean before we started throwing them around. “Did she just text me, ‘hey, what’s up?’ at 11 p.m. to be friendly, or because she wants to have sex with me?”

The “nice guy” is being weeded out in favor of the modern man who isn’t classically romantic and, really, is just kind of a jerk, only too happy to get drunk and have a one-night stand. Girls who were told as kids to expect Prince Charming now see Mr. Charming as old-fashioned and weird, the kind of guy their mom would date.

spent most of high school completely avoiding the dating scene because I already couldn’t stand how backwards everything already felt. So I told myself that college would be better — older people, mature people, rational people. Looking back now, I can see the logic, but wow, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Nobody changed between high school and college. Nobody “matured.” So take the high school mentality and add the extra pressures of drugs, partying and sex that come with college, as well as another three years of advancements in communication technology and social media, and we have only regressed since then. I watched a lot of dumb people do dumb things in high school, but all that pales in comparison to what I’ve seen in college.

I think part of that is a subconscious rebellion against being the “transitional” generation: the one who grew up hearing, “You are special,” just like every generation had before us, until the doors connecting the corners of the world were created and thrust open and we were the first to discover, “No. You are but one in a sea of billions.” We are not The Greatest Generation, that fought valiantly in wars and returned as heroes; we are not The Baby Boomer Generation, the sons and daughters who reshaped the world around them; we are nihilists struggling to be heard in a world we are afraid will leave us behind.

We were raised under the assumption that the world would continue to be as it was Then instead of being prepared for the world as it is Now. It is a far different place than our parents could have known it would be. We are, after all, living in an age where you can press a button to have a computer instantly make a custom playlist for you.

So as we each struggle to find our place in a world spinning faster than it ever has, we can’t help but take solace once in a while in the relics of our youth from before we even knew what an identity crisis was: an old cartoon, a trading card, a cassette mixtape.