Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (Hardcover)

~ Thurston Moore (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Stop. Fast-forward. Pause. Rewind. It has become part of our vocabulary when talking about the momentum of our lives . . . .
Over forty years ago Phillips launched the compact audio cassette at the 1963 Berlin Radio Show and our relationship with music has never been the same. Durable, inexpensive, and portable, the new format was an instant success. By the 1970s, we were voraciously recording music onto blank cassettes. It allowed us to listen to, and, in effect, curate music in a new way. Privately. Mix tapes let us become our own DJs, creating mixes for friends, lovers, and family, for parties and road trips.
Artist and musician Thurston Moore looks back at the plastic gadget that first let us make our own compilations. Over eighty home tapers, including artists, musicians, actors, writers, directors, comediennes, talk show hosts, and, of course, record store employees were invited to tell the stories behind their mixes. From the Romantic Tape, to the Break-up Tape, the Road Trip Tape, to the "Indoctrination" Tape-the art and text that emerged was of the mix cassette as a new way of re-sequencing music to make sense of our most stubbornly inexpressible feelings-a way of explaining ourselves to someone else, or to ourselves.

About the Author

Thurston Moore is founding member of the rock group Sonic Youth, as well as a published poet. His books include Alabama Wildman, Fuck a Hippie, But Be a Punk, and Total Poon. He also runs EcstaticPeace.com, a music, art, and literature website.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Universe (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789311992
• ISBN-13: 978-0789311993
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #199,724 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Driving in Cars While Smoking, August 16, 2005

By	matthewslaughter "matthewslaughter" (Arlington, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This neat little curio--along with sections of Hornby's "High Fidelity" [1995]--is a great artifact for those of us old enough to have shared music with friends via the cassette tape. Before mix-CDs, cassette tapes were a great way to hip your friends to new bands or to write a love letter to your latest crush without having to rely on your own bad poetry. Instead, you had to create a track list that would be impressionable on the recipient, and come up with some cool titles for each side of the cassette. Also, the more Scotch tape to make ex-cellent collage-cover-art with, the merrier! You also had to record the tape in real time, and make sure you could fit everything on the 45 minute side without the songs cutting off. This book captures all of that, including brief notes by the people who submitted some of their mix tapes to Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), editor of the project. There is plenty of cool tape art and great track lists on display here. I like the tape Jim O'Rourke (of everyband, including Sonic Youth, Loose Fur, Gastr del Sol) makes a tape for a female love-interest thats Side One ends with the apocalyptic "Ambulance Blues" by Neil Young. It's these kind of details that make this book so fascinating and fun to flip through. It is an anthropological artifact, documenting the fact that these "unauthorized" tapes, at one point considered threats to the music industry as CDRs and online sharing are now, were really important sentimental, formative and foundational items to many people during the 80s and 90s. Bravo Thurston! Great idea.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Thurston throws a book together at the last minute, June 14, 2006

By	K. Platz "shay" (brooklyn, ny) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I had really high hopes for this book.
Being one of the last people I know that still makes mix tapes on a regular basis I was excited for that feeling of togetherness and validation that occurs only when you find a network of people "out there" that see something the same way you do. I was distinctly dissapointed. I am a huge fan of Thurston Moore and I will say that his pieces of writing are the only moments of this book worth reading (and they are deffinately worth reading). However, it feels like Moore emailed a bunch of people and asked them to contribute track lists/art work/essays of/on mix tapes they'd made or recieved. More than half of the contributions feel thrown together or hardly considered and many are of mix cds and not tapes at all. I was hoping for a tribute/document of a unique mode of communication between people where the time and effort put in to the TAPE stands as a testament to the intensity of feelings being felt. Instead of buying this book I recomend buying a tape deck and either busting out those old mixes or make new ones of your own. It will be far more satisfying and true to feeling your looking for (but won't find) in this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars a limited mix, December 30, 2008

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Like the editor of this book, I grew of age in the thick of the mix-tape era, and to a certain extent, mourn its passing. And like many of the contributors to this celebration of "cassette culture," I spent hundreds of hours obsessing over track selection, sequencing, fade-ins, the overt and subtextual messages embedded in each mix, liner notes, cover art, etc. So, I tend to gravitate toward books that invoke that lost world (sorry folks, the mix CD is similar, and I do make 'em, but it's not the same) -- books like Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and Songbook, or Rob Sheffield's memoir of grief, Love Is a Mix Tape.

This book is a kind of interesting and frustrating document of the mix tape, limited in many ways by the relatively insular world from which its contributors are drawn. Moore is a legendary underground musician (with Sonic Youth) and for this book, he seems to have fired off emails to all his hipsterati friends in the art and music world, asking for contributions. The resulting hodgepodge of stuff is nicely packaged in a book mimicking the dimensions of a cassette tape, but it's all pretty insular. Page after page of random track listings, homemade covers, etc. from people you're unlikely to have heard of, featuring music you're unlikely to have heard. A few bits and pieces capture the possibility of the mixtape, such as Allison Anders explanation of one made for her, since returned in anger, and forever mourned.

What gets lost in all this is that for every obscurity-laden, collage-covered, mix-tape-as-art piece, the bedrooms of the Western world spawned 1,000 more mainstream "hits of 1983" type mix tapes. There's zero evidence of the prevalence of the pop mix tape here, with probably the most mainstream example being Kate Spade's (yes, that Kate Spade) wonderfully banal mix of the usual Dylan/Beatles/Van Morrison/Elton John tracks. It's important to remember that DIY culture can encompass a wide range of participants, and not just the cool kids, and that's something that gets lost in this particular "celebration."

Still, if you were ever into making mix tapes, this is a book that will bring back the memories and make you want to dig into that box of tapes in the basement and find a tape deck.