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Recalling more pleasant kinds of memory in Wired, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore relates his experiences with mix-tapes. Somehow, I had assumed that the mix-tape was as old as the consumer cassette deck, but Moore contends that the mix-tape only really came into being with the advent of portable cassette players like the Walkman. Although the piece is nostalgic, Moore doesn't really argue that the mix CD is that different than the mix-tape, saying, "CD technology has displaced the cassette in the mainstream, and mix CDs have become the new cultural love letter/trading post."

This weekend as I was compiling a mix CD for a friend who's moving away, I became circumspect about my more perfectionist tendencies, and asked myself, "Why do you feel like you have to fill up all 80 minutes of the CD?" I realized it was an atavistic impulse from my mix-tape days. If you don't fill a side of a cassette, you leave your listener with an annoying amount of dead air. I had a repertoire of songs I used to fill a side up, using a short Guided by Voices song as a short interlude to trim off a bit of blankness, or simply allowing Neu's "Lieber Honig" to cut off short once the head hit the leader. Of course, mix CDs simply end when the music ends, so I don't need to worry about kicking my pals into minutes of silence.

Moore's piece is part of an anthology he's editing, called Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I probably would have snapped this book up as soon as I had the spare cash. Not all of my reading was light, but back then I loved to read about other people's experiences, particularly subcultural experiences; I suspect that this led me to be an English major. I don't read much material like this any more, perhaps because of my grad school workload and perhaps because I've had my own experiences, but I suspect a lot of my attraction to this kind of reading had to do with being a rebellious kid trapped in Oklahoma, thirsting for something different.