Mix "tapes," 2005: reflections

So here's a funny thing: remember back in high school and college (circa mid-1981 through mid-1989 for some) when you'd make mix tapes for friends, crushes, and bfs/gfs? Remember that process of laboriously writing down how long songs lasted (or how many numbers rolled by on the counter-thingy, music odometer, whatever it was), figuring out the right song order, putting a blank tape in one side of the double cassette deck, all the stopping and starting, forwarding, reversing, cuing, writing out the labels, on and on and on? It was like an out-and-out declaration of love, whether platonic or otherwise, and really showed how much you cared about someone?

Cut to 2005, and iTunes (or MusicMatch or whatever): you load up all your cds onto your pc or Mac (or laptop or iBook, yeah, yeah, spare me). Load them onto your mp3 player of choice (mine is the silver mini -- sleek!), and away you go. And meanwhile, you have this kick-ass dj booth sittin' right there on your pc, to drag and drop like a sumbitch, and making playlists and burning cds is literally a matter of perhaps 10 minutes' work, including the burning and exporting the song list to a Word file you can print for the jewel case. Which is not to say that the thought isn't still there, expressing affection and regard and thought, etc., but maaaaan oh man, these labor-saving devices are the shit, ain't they?!

All this is by way of sort of revelling in how I think WCB will reasct to the cds I've just made for his birthday. He used to work at a telecomm company and played this heinous game with his friends there whereby they would torture one another by calling someone's voicemail and speaking a line or two of a lyric from a pop song sure to get stuck in the person's head as soon as they heard the lyric. Poor Will (whom you may recognize from an earlier post) made the grievous mistake of telling me about this and now we play, although mainly by e-mail, which turns out to work just as well. So the music I've chosen for him falls into these categories (playlist names on my iTunes): '80s, Anyone? and Fromage I and Fromage II. Really, y'all, I am not a nice girl. ('Cept when I am, and then I'm really really nice. Don'tcha wish you knew me i.r.l.??)