I'll make you a tape.

A mixtape used to mean sitting in from of my dual tape deck/CD boombox, syncing up my favorite tunes and grinding out one of these UX-90s (120 if I was feeling ambitious) at 1x speed. Of course then I didn't really know what 1x speed was. In the early days Ace of Bass made it onto quite a few tapes, later Ian told me of a "mix"tape his brother had produced with a full 60 minutes of 'Semi-Charmed Life.' That's like almost 1000 "doots."

Then the CD-R came out. This was huge, but I don't think the game was really changed until Napster. I think we forget how awesome Napster was, a seemingly endless library of free (or stolen for you Narcs out there) songs that could be delivered to your shared folder in about 40 minutes on a 28.8 connection. If you were lucky enough to have two phone lines you could do something else while your songs downloaded, but if you only had one you either had to do your downloading late at night, or watch the phones in the house like a hawk, if your download was interrupted you were SOL, you had to start it over. I digress, the important thing here is that suddenly if you could remember the name of a song then with a little time and tenacity it could be on your mixtape. CD. Whatever.

While the CD-R and the Napster really improved the song selection and burning was far faster than recording, the CD mix had a little less love involved. If somebody made you a tape you knew that they carefully pre-planned the songs and their order. Then they sat there for at least an hour timing their play+records and stops. Now they still did some planning and all, but they just clicked burn cd and they were done. You wouldn't get the first couple seconds of the next song on the album, and you wouldn't hear snippets of whatever was on the tape before in the gaps.

The i-pod and i-tunes, and the increasing accessibility of mp3s and music libraries have made the mix, or do we call it a playlist now, a little less special still. This brings me to the main purpose of this post, which is to applaud a new mixtape. But this isn't like the mixtapes I remember, it's not even like a DJ Kicks style mixtape. To be honest I'm not even sure why it's called a mixtape.



As far as I can tell a mixtape is now an album that is produced very quickly and doesn't count as an album. Which doesn't mean that it can't kick ass. The Cool Kids' Gone Fishing does. This non-album is as good or better than their last non-album The Bake Sale EP which garnered the number seven spot in my top 10 albums of '08. The only dark spot is a repeated sample that says "the cannon" in reference to mixtape partner and producer Don Cannon that gets annoying.

I gotta say, there's something to this mixtape thing. It's kind of awesome to hear the Cool Kids rhyme about the '09 NBA playoffs while those very same playoffs are going on. If you haven't heard the Cool Kids yet download it! It's a legit free download!

It's not often you can get great free music with the artist's permission. The Cool Kids, making the mixtape special again.