There was a time when, instead of digital playlists, teenagers exchanged mixtapes between them. Those tapes contained the reflection of their author’s spirit. They were a sort of personal treasure that would only be shared with some people. Those were different times.
There was a time when, instead of digital playlists, teenagers exchanged mixtapes between them. Those tapes contained the reflection of their author’s spirit. They were a sort of personal treasure that would only be shared with some people. Those were different times.

It must have been at the end of 1997, or maybe the beginning of 98, that I executed, with rigor and exigence, respecting all its fundamental principles, my last true mixtape. I still know by heart the titles of some of the songs that were in it – Everlong, by Foo Fighters, hey, by Pixies, Think, from Sebadoh -, also because, if I were to redo a musical selection that characterizes me today, odds are some of those songs (and some others) would still be on that queue. I had just begun college. Usually, it’s when you get to college that, in most cases, we are faced with the universe – the universe, in the sense of an ample, vast existence, beyond our circle and what is familiar, what protects and surrounds us. That was the case for me. In these circumstances, it is urgent that we hold our ground, and it’s essential that others – who are new, different from the other ones we were used to before – can identify us: who we are, what we like, where we live, what we know about things, how we behave, what we aspire to. To discover and reveal all the details that make us, us – it has equal parts of art and science, though it is mainly based on a more or less illogical artifact called intuition. Those naïve conversations about politics or ideology, poesy or religion, might even be interesting and, well, revealing, but they can also hide, through dissimulation or deliberate fraud, sides of us (and, necessarily, of others) that we consider to be less interesting. That is why there are very few things more revealing of someone’s personality than their musical taste. And that is also why, when it comes to unveiling what lays in our essence, mixtapes are a type of carbon-14 used to date archeological traces: in a line-up of musical taste we have everything that matters to someone – the sophistication of their preferences pops up immediately, but there are other layers that are slowly revealed: what they know, what they have read, to what urban tribe they belong or wish to belong to, their level of optimism, the presence or absence of romanticism, their mood, their dreams and ambitions, even someone’s traumas can be identified from a music playlist, if we listen carefully to the songs that are presented to us, and understand the sequence in which they were arranged.
The discovery
She was very cute, I believe one of the cutest in the whole university. I was a very thin kid, 1,60m something, crooked teeth and a lost adolescence in an indecisive land between being a chic and bucolic suburb and the servant province of the bourgeoise capital. To my advantage I had only my poetry, naively frivolous and pedantic, even shy on vocabulary, and the fact that she, the subject of my passion, was 19 years old, a year older than me, and an entire life to face the fact that, yes, everything was a very big misunderstanding – the secret was trying my luck and enjoying it while it lasted. I also had a band, which gave me extra credit and legitimized, making it look almost natural, my unusual approach, “Hi, Raimunda, I made you a mixtape”. The name is fictional. The day after we were making out in the Gulbenkian gardens, despite the fact that my mixtape included a Blind Zero track. It was the 90s, everything was fair game, we had very few demands. The most important thing was love, and the most urgent was not to waste time. We didn’t. The success of that mixtape was not random. No matter how much trust I had in the charms of my musical taste, I opted not to take too many risks. If, on one hand, I wanted to show off – and I did – with pride, some bold choices (how does someone put a song from Tool in the middle of a conquest compilation? With courage, that’s how. Lots of it. And some outrage – to show moderate outrage is very important, because it transmits to the wanted person that we too can be rebels, practically bad boys, though we don’t feel the need to practice it 24h per day, seven days a week; in the end, it suggests that when we want to, or if we want to, we too can be crazy, even though we don’t make a fuss of this discrete capacity of ours), on the other hand, I considered relevant to show her – and I remind you we are still speaking of “Raimunda”, the target of some of my most indiscrete looks and the cause for the chills down my spine and palpitations at the time – how much we shared and bonded over, the way our taste touched on so many points (notice the subtle erotism), the impressive amount of songs I had chosen as mine and that, in the end – oh, surprise! -, she also preferred those to the rest. It might not have been the prettiest exercise, and today I admit the scheme I had going back then was not my best moment, but truth is, more than 20 years have gone by and I ended losing more than what I gained from that success of mine. That smartness had a price I took some time to discover – and even more to pay. But what brings us here is music: for weeks, I paid attention to the conversations we had as a group, during breaks at school, seating at coffee shops. Violent Femmes? Oh, yes, sure, love them. The Clash? Raimunda, The Clash is a universal anthem. And so on and so forth, adding names and, in some cases, adding records to my collection – in fact, not all those were actual preferences of mine. Today, they would be spontaneous, natural, nearly mandatory choices. But the truth is that, back then, I fed much more of Mudhoney and Stone Temple Pilots rather than punks new wave, or of the Femmes’ uncanny folk-rock. Moving on: on the same day I gave her the mixtape, Raimunda called me – this is literal, in that time people actually used telephones, these objects connected to the wall through wires – and said “I’ve got chills”, and that’s when I understood that the power of the mixtape could go way beyond transforming one into the coolest guy in class, and that there was a practical application of the object: to rattle the heart of our dream. It’s important to underline that I discovered all of this in a 100% empirical test, given that I would only read High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby, years later – Raimunda gave it to me when we said goodbye on one of the last times we ever saw each other and I believe that gesture was precisely what settled our breakup.
Technique
It’s necessary to rewind and put aside all the plotting from the exercise I described before, also because it would be very reductive to look at a mixtape simply as a utilitarian object. It is not. The ancestral art of the mixtape has its inception – I speculate, evidently, but I do so very firmly – in a primordial instinct of human beings, that comes from our ability to think abstractly. In the same way that babies feel marveled by their first works of art, no matter how eschatological they might be, teenagers are fascinated when they realize that “wait a minute, I have a taste”, and then they feel the need to shout “Hey! Guys! Guys! Hey, I have a taste!” The mixtape is that shout. Contrary to what happened with my last, true and legitimate mixtape, whose purpose was rather obscure (and, on many levels, obscene, but let’s stop there), my first, if they had any pretention at all, it would be as ingenuous as the ones of Prometheus when he moved Eve’s front leaf away and claimed “Eureka!” (It’s possible I’m getting my stories mixed here). Nonetheless, what is important to retain is the following: mixtapes are objects that are part of a ritual of transition where adolescents – this ancestral art usually began around this time – finds themselves straining away from being a recipient of ignorance as they transform into a personalized envoy of a certain taste, with character. In my case, and in the case of people I know, from my generation, friends of mine, to make a mixtape implied that we rooted ourselves physically close to the stereo and resorted to several tools, supports and buttons. Today, in the era of touch buttons, smartphones 5G and digital playlists, it might seem quite archaic that someone, in order to tape 60 or 90 minutes of music, depending on the tapes, had to reserve a full afternoon and go through something like 30 albums – usually CDs, but I also resorted to other tapes many times (with inevitable consequences when it comes to the loss of sound quality) and yet to magical object that would only be resurrected many years later, the vinyl. The procedure was not as simple as it was rudimentary. I’ll explain: if, on one hand, we seemed to be working in a sort of musical disk workshop – that is the point where it might seem rudimentary -, logistics demanded some planning (pages and pages of school notebooks with organized music titles and other scratched ones), a lot of sensibility and even a sense of tact power, let’s call it like that, that had to be refined enough to cut the endings of the songs on the right place and not let white strips in between tunes, at the same time that abrupt entries on the following song shouldn’t happen either. It’s important to say, especially for younger readers, who may not be as familiarized with these antiquity technologies, that mixtapes worked with magnetic tape. Meaning, one blank recording implied a re-recording on top of that first one, which diminished the sound quality and was a waste of time. The thing is that it was only possible to confirm the recording when the tape stopped, and you would only stop it at the end. Besides, rewinding took time, and demanded extraordinary precision in the art of guessing, without references and only through the means of mental calculations (or premonition), of where one should stop.
The infamous digital
It wasn’t long after having recorded the now-famous mixtape during college that tapes began their popularity decline, followed by the one of their utility and, alas, extinction. It’s the CD-R’s fault, the infamous Compact Disc – Recordable, a device almost as archaic as the ones previously described, but with a set of characteristics that, at the time, sounded like qualities. First of all, they were digital, which had been presented to everyone as a big advantage. Then, they could be fed into computers’ CD players – yes, there was a time where one could fit CD’s, CD-R’s, and DVDs into computers -, which allowed us to record song playlists previously defined and onto the computer. In theory, to “burn” – was the term used in slang, which meant to save files on the computer – a CD was in all aspects similar to making a mixtape: we chose the songs, took the CD’s and recorded them in the desired order. Practically speaking, it was all a huge disappointment: we imported full-on files, which didn’t allow us to make the softness of the transitions pop, along with the fact that it wasn’t possible (or it would be extremely complex since it required auxiliary methods) to resort to tapes nor vinyl as sources. Everything became faster and more practical, but as it so happens oftentimes, it also lost its charm, romanticism and authenticity. A CD-R with a playlist will always be different from a mixtape, if anything because a list of songs that has been extracted from digital files is just that and nothing more, a sequence of songs, while an analogical mixtape will always depend on someone’s talent and skill for thoroughly cutting the canny sequel. Contemporality took yet another step in the opposite direction from the dearly missed mixtapes. Today, we don’t even have to “burn” CD files. All it takes is signing up to one of the various platforms at our disposal and chose what songs to include on the playlist. Sometimes it’s as simple as pressing a heart button so they are added to the list. The poetry of the mixtape is gone, perhaps permanently. All that remains now is the memory of those who made them – or, in certain, rarer cases, in shoeboxes filled with tapes, just like the ones I have back home. I like to think of them as the last stronghold of the material existence of a moment in time – a fleeting era where we could mark our place in the world by making, carefully and in the pursuit of a genius touch, a selection of perfect songs. If I were to make one today, I would open with Vegas, by Big Thief, continue with All We Ask, by Grizzly Bear, then Night of Joy, by Breeders, and then continue down that path, until I conquered the world.
Translated from the original, as part of Vogue Portugal's Music Issue, published in june 2021.
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