Music snobbery and mix tapes in relationships!

I came aross this article, "Who do you love?" on Tiny Mix Tapes and found it hilarious and somewhat true. Finding out the music tastes of someone you were dating was somehow really important back when you were younger. We all know now that's it's not that important but it's fun to think back about back then when you met someone new and your first question was 'Uh ... so ... what kinds of bands do you listen to ..." Why you may ask would someone base an entire relationship on a music collection? Well, as articulated in the article "Simple. Your taste in music is important. Your special love interest's taste in music is doubly so." :)

The author does offer some salvation though ... in the guise of a mix tape. Mix tapes are a sort of middle ground where you can offer the object of your affection some connection with your favorite music. Mix tapes become grounds on which shared catalogues of music are based on in the future. Listening to someone else's mixtape gives you insight into what they are thinking about, it's an obtuse form of signalling. I can't even begin to tell you how much mix tapes matter and what effort and art is required to create the perfect mix tape. Nick Hornby offers some perspective on this in his book High Fidelity,

"The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules."

Do people even make mix tapes anymore? Wait ... I forgot ... it's now called an itunes personal playlist or a podcast :)

BTW, there's an entire sub-culture devoted to the mixtape, check out these links:

Thurston Moore's Book on mixtapes "Introduction to Mixtape: The Art of Cassette Culture"

A web community , The Art of the Mix, where you can upload and listen to playlists that have been submitted.