Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Mix Tapes

In my misspent youf, there always seemed plenty of time (hours and hours of it) to put together the perfect party tapes for road trips and beer blasts. And back in those days of C-90s and vinyl LPs, it actually TOOK hours and hours to do something worth listening to. I've still got almost all of those tapes, althought many of them have been played so many times in car stereos that they've almost worn out.

With modern technology, the equation is dramatically changed. For many people, it's a matter of loading up the MP3 player and plugging the cord into their car stereo - why bother making a CD? Even if one has a CD player that won't play MP3 disks, it is still much, much easier to do a disk today - a matter of half an hour or so if one is really in a hurry - than it used to be. But as I found out a few days ago, that does not lend itself to memorable comps. I mentioned a few months ago that since I'm always concerned that I'll leave a valued CD in a rental car player, I've started putting together comps that I can leave behind without worrying about it - the most I'm out is the $0.33 or so for another blank CD. Since I headed up to DC earlier this week, I decided to slap together a new one but, as is usual these days, I didn't have much time to put into it. What I ended up with wasn't bad but had some problems that I would have easily avoided back in the day.

Rental Car Number 3
01. Dialogue - Johnny Quest
02. Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way? - Leftover Salmon
03. Salvation - The Cranberries
04. Perhaps Vampires is a Bit Strong But... - Arctic Monkeys
05. New Pollution - Beck
06. You Killed My Love - Bio Ritmo
07. Elektrobank - The Chemical Brothers
08. Somebody Else's Body - Urge Overkill
09. The Vampire Song (live) - Concrete Blonde
10. Black and White - The dBs
11. Magic Johnson - Red Hot Chili Peppers
12. Flame Retardant Asbestos Suit - Sex Police
13. Note to Self: Don't Die - Ryan Adams
14. Deadbeat Club - B-52s
15. Root Down - The Beastie Boys
16. A Dame with a Rod - Juliana Hatfield
17. The Magnificent Seven - The Clash
18. Benny the Bouncer - Emerson, Lake and Palmer

First of all, if I'd been paying attention I'd have never put two songs with "vampire" in the title on the same mix. Three, yes - that makes it intentional. Two is just sloppy. Then there's the preponderance of funky beats and white boy rap - I usually try to go for more variation on these things than that. Fun but could have been better.

1 Comments:

At 10:33 AM, Blogger tmay245 said...

I was just reminising about the Nakamichi 2-Track cassette I used to record 'the band'. At the time I could have done some stuff with cakewalk and an O2 DAC (Spdiff to optical) but that shit doesn't mix well with a weekend of heavy drinkin'. not to mention big hd's were only 2gb at the time. these punk kids today have it easy, oh yeah, i forgot, i'm one of those punk kids...

 

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