Mix-Tapes Across the Planet

I think everyone on Earth should be supplied with the materials and time needed to create a mix-tape for a complete stranger. Rather than making it one for a girl you like or the boy you wish you could kiss, we'd all be given a 90-minute tape, access to whatever songs we needed, and roughly an afternoon to compile. Not knowing who it would be given to, how old, what gender, religion, part of the world, class, color, sick, well, famous, or destitute, somehow, some team would be set up to distribute the mix-tapes, ensuring that everyone made one, and everyone got one. Those who are newborns would have their mix-tape safely held until their second birthday, those who lay dying could listen til they pass, and so on.

By now you've already said to yourself, "Aw, man, I'd HAVE to make sure I get a Miles Davis song on there," or,"Dude, I hope my mix-tape goes to a young kid in a remote village so I can expose him to Operation Ivy!"

While you are cool for liking these groups/musicians, the point of the exercise is not to masturbate your audio library; it's to see what feelings it invokes to remember what it felt like the first time a song painted on your heart and in your mind exactly what you felt when you were feeling something so strong it was surging from your abdomen, melting your brain, having southern bound excursions, delicately thumbing through the pages that are you... not the you that you see in the mirror, but the you that you see when you catch a glimpse of your profile's reflection on the side of a building. THAT. That right there. The songs in your head.

It's the feelings. Not the girls or the boys or the moms and dads or the lack of any of them. The experience, both cerebral and coronary, both in your hippocampus and in your atriums, yes, the feelings. You may tie a certain song to a break up with a John, another song to a breakup with a Jewish doctor, another song to losing your virginity, another to the loss of your intellectual innocence, another to the death of a loved one, or an entire album to finding out you'd have psoriasis for the rest of your life. The events are meaningless to the song -- the song does not know you, YOU know the SONG.

So when you're mix-tape winds up in the hands of an eight-year-old in a Kenyan village, she is not most likely to appreciate that you were tattooed for the first time at 15, living a life revolted by and in revolution to your parents, sneaking out to sing the entire digitally remastered Ziggy Stardust album with extra tracks in your best friend's hand-me-down Taurus. Any child with that much insight belongs on Montel Williams. No, they will not get that about you, or from the song(s).

We've all had the experience of loving a song/album/band/musician that we'd tout to our friends as more magical than every carnival ride and Dairy Queen in history combined, only to have them listen to it... and talk over the entire song about how they are hungry, how their parents are dummies, how so-and-so blew them up, how they cheated through college, and so on. Why is it that that people cannot shut up for a 3:12 track? WHY? Because they don't know the song, and the song cannot make them know it.

So instead of focusing on being sooper kewl and making sure all those bootleg tracks that NOBODY has are on your mix-tape to a total stranger who may be an 88-year-old grandmother of four in Liverpool, focus on what words, what instruments, and what elements of the music transcend all times and cultures, all logic and space, all momentary things.

Make a mix-tape and send it to a random person's address, I don't care where you get it from, juts make sure it gets to someone, someone who doesn't know you. I'm going to start mine off with this: