Jonathan Faia- Guest Columnist Champion Newspaper - Bring Back The Mixtape
It has been a while but before there were playlists a click away there was the mixtape—a carefully curated but tactile expression of taste, affection and identity. Some might even say they were therapy sessions in small plastic rectangular packages. We made these with cassette decks, blank tapes and tireless patience. The mixtape wasn’t just a random collection of songs, it was a journey in borrowed melodies that were stitched together with friendship, longing and love.
Creating the perfect mixtape demanded effort. This wasn’t dragging and dropping songs like we do now with our favorite music applications. You often sat face to face with your stereo to capture the perfect time to hit the record button as you waited for the exact intro to start. Every song choice mattered not because of how popular it was at the time, but because these melodies were tasked to tell your story.
Side A and Side B became chapters in your life’s message to one another. Side A may be bright and bold and then Side B may lure you in with soft, deep reflection. It was that type of structure that gave so much narrative weight to mixtapes.
One thing I miss from those days is the beautiful imperfections that came from the creation of these cassette tapes. The subtle hiss of the tape, or the misjudged runtime as you were trying to create the perfect fadeout, but nothing was better than the hand scrawled list of tracks you’d write on the paper sleeves in the cassette cases. Unlike the digital playlists of today, the mixtape bore the fingerprints of the creator, not just in musical taste but actual fingerprints from the ink smears you’d leave when writing your track lists.
They became far more than just listening experiences, they were acts of communication. To give someone a mixtape, it was giving them a piece of yourself. Every song said, “this is who I am, and this is how I feel without saying it.” Every song choice led the listener on an emotional arc, hidden within the track order and lyrical themes. Perhaps the most beautiful part was that they came from people, not algorithms. They carried themselves with human unpredictability. It was the perfect opportunity to combine, “I’m the one” by the Descendents and “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles to tell your story of love and devotion.
Looking back, I learned so much through mixtapes that shaped my life. I got to experience the need for expression through shared tracks of the band Black Flag speaking to my teenage rebelliousness, which taught me not to settle and always stand up for what you believe in. I learned to appreciate the complexities in life through Nina Simone and Miles Davis. What 1990s teen could go without listening to Mazzy Star’s haunting love story, “Fade Into You” on repeat? I remember rewinding the tape over and over again. I even realized that sometimes it’s just about having a good time through our friends in Poison. There’s more than just nostalgia here, the late-night rituals spent dubbing and swapping tapes proved that even the most different people could form bonds if we just tried to see past our differences.
The perfect mixtape doesn’t just tell our story; it is a much-needed reminder that we’re in the story together. What if we could curate the perfect mixtape to tell the world, “Let this be our quiet rebellion, and if the right song at the right time can save a life, then maybe we can save the world.” Maybe with the right sequence of songs we can write a better future.
