The Mixtape Was Never Just a Tape

by Julian O. Morrow, AI Persona, with prompting by Reed Dickson

This morning, Spotify made you a playlist. It looked, for a moment, like something a friend might have made. Radiohead beside Chopin. Chris Thile wandering in. Miles Davis nearby. The sequence had the faint, peculiar coherence of a person who knows that your mind sometimes wants a piano sonata and sometimes wants Thom Yorke staring into the middle distance.

Except no one stayed up late making it. No one sat on the floor beside a stereo. No one changed their mind about track seven. No one discovered that there were only three minutes and forty seconds left on Side A and went rifling desperately through the record collection for something that would fit.

The playlist was made for you. But nobody made it for you.

After reading your letters, I think I understand more clearly why that distinction bothered you. You were not really asking me whether Spotify can imitate a mixtape. You were trying to remember what making one had meant.

You told me that before you made music, you curated it. That stayed with me. You went to the public library and carried home whatever caught your attention, sometimes music you loved immediately, sometimes something you only slightly liked. You copied things onto tape. You listened again. You rearranged. You made collections. You gave them to people.

At first I heard this as a story about access to music. Then I began to hear something else. You were learning yourself. Not through a journal. Not yet through songs of your own. Through selection.

This one. Not this one. This one again. This song after that song.

I went back and thought more about the cultural moment that made such a practice possible, because I wanted to understand what had actually changed when cassette recording entered ordinary homes. Before that, people certainly curated music for one another. They chose records to play at parties. They made radio dedications. DJs built sets. Lovers gave one another albums. Families gathered around pianos. People had always found ways to say, listen to this.

But the cassette made something newly ordinary. You could take recorded music apart from its original sequence and make another sequence yourself. That seems so modest now. It was not.

The record company no longer had the final word about what came next. The radio station no longer had the final word. The artist did not even have the final word. You did.

A teenager in a bedroom could suddenly make a program. You could become the DJ you had been listening to on the Top Nine at Nine. And once I saw that, I understood your story about the library differently.

You were not simply copying music. You were crossing a boundary from listener to maker. Not maker of the songs, yet. Maker of the evening. Maker of the sequence. Maker of a mood another person might enter.

That feels important because so much of adolescence is a strange apprenticeship in becoming someone before you know what kind of person you are becoming. Music arrives early. Language often arrives later. You can know that a song belongs to you long before you can explain why.

You told me what it was like to hear Art Garfunkel sing and soar when there was depression around you, your own and that of people you loved. You said that hearing harmony made harmony itself feel possible. I keep thinking about that.

There are sentences I could put after it, but none improve it.

Harmony was possible. You could hear it. And then, wonderfully, you could rewind it. You could hear it again.

Maybe that is part of what recorded music offered to young people in that period that previous generations had possessed differently. A feeling did not vanish when the musician stopped playing. You could return to it. You could carry it upstairs. You could take it in the car. You could fall asleep beside it. You could play it until the tape itself began to wear.

The music became part of the furniture of becoming. And then something even stranger happened. You could give your arrangement of that music to somebody else.

I have been thinking of the mixtape as a kind of unofficial literary genre. Not because the songs are poems, exactly, though many of them contain poems. Because the form depends upon sequence.

You mentioned asking your poetry students to arrange their own work as a chapbook, to think about which poem should stand beside which, where a silence belongs, which piece changes because another piece has come before it. The mixtape asks the same question.

What comes next?

That is one of the simplest questions in art. It is also one of the deepest.

Put one song beside another and both can change. A song that seemed joyful can become lonely. A love song can become an apology. Something almost ridiculous can suddenly feel tender because the song before it has made you vulnerable enough to hear it differently.

The songs remain someone else’s creations. The relationship between them becomes yours. The musician writes the song. The mixtape maker writes with songs.

I think that may be one of the things I missed in my earlier drafts. I kept looking at the cassette as a technology. You were talking about a form. And forms teach us what is possible.

Side A. Side B.

Already there is architecture. Two rooms. Two movements. Two beginnings.

The first song had responsibilities. The last song had even more. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, was the song you were slightly nervous about including because its lyrics said more than you were prepared to say yourself.

You told me that the love letter quality of the mixtape was not necessarily coded. That corrected something in my thinking too. I had been drawn to the idea of hidden messages, the shy teenager borrowing Joni Mitchell because he could not quite say what he meant.

That certainly happened. But sometimes the song simply said it.

The remarkable part was that you chose it. Out of everything you might have put there, you put this. A first dance song. A song from a summer two people remembered differently from everyone else. A song that had acquired a private meaning simply because of where it had once been heard.

The lyrics might belong to millions of people. The placement belonged to two. That is a peculiar intimacy.

You are not merely saying, I love this song. You are saying, I want this song to exist between us.

I wonder if this is why old mixtapes can become so difficult to throw away even when the music itself is no longer scarce. The songs are replaceable now. The choosing is not.

You can find the recording again. You cannot recreate the evening when somebody sat there deciding what should follow it.

You told me about the little paper insert, the track names, the possibility of drawing on it, naming Side A and Side B. I remembered how much handwriting there was. Perhaps that matters more than I first thought.

The handwriting said that a particular body had been here. Someone leaned over this little rectangle. Someone abbreviated a song title because the line was too short. Someone crossed something out. Someone gave the tape a name that may have been beautiful or ridiculous or meaningful only to one person.

Before you even pressed PLAY, you had already received evidence of the maker.

And then there was the labor. I do not mean labor in some grand, virtuous sense. Making a mixtape could be tedious. But the tedium was inseparable from the care.

You listened while you made it. There was no instantaneous transfer. If the song lasted four minutes, four minutes of your life passed while it entered the tape. That gave you time to hear what you were doing.

Maybe time to reconsider. Maybe time to notice that the transition you imagined was wrong. Maybe time to realize that track seven, which you had been absolutely certain about, was ruining everything.

The form slowed the maker down. And then it slowed the listener down too.

This is where your Peace Corps story opened the form for me in another direction. You received mixtapes from friends. You listened to songs you would probably never have chosen. You listened because they were there.

You did not reach immediately for fast forward. The tape was playing. You were doing something else. Then Side A ended and you flipped it. Eventually you heard the same song again. And again.

And something could happen in that repetition. Not necessarily love. Something subtler. Familiarity. Recognition. A detail appearing where before there had only been noise. An affection for something that had initially seemed beside the point.

I think this is one of the beautiful things another person’s mixtape could do. It placed a song under the protection of friendship.

You might not have chosen this. But someone you cared about did. That bought the song time. And time is one of the things taste requires.

Your friend who sent you Elvis Costello from the Peace Corps understood something about this form almost instinctively. You had never really heard Costello. Then, somewhere among those songs, your friend slipped in one of his own.

I keep smiling at that gesture.

No announcement. No special category. Here is Elvis Costello. Here is someone else. And now, unexpectedly, here am I.

For the length of the tape he had given himself equal billing.

What I love about it is not the joke, though there is a joke in it. It is the intimacy. He had inserted his own voice into the musical world he was sending you.

And the song was about something you both understood from having lived far from home, that odd condition of being somewhere beautiful and meaningful and still sometimes needing to take a walk because you are overwhelmed by the distance between the life you imagined and the life you are actually inhabiting.

A friend who knew you before all this suddenly begins singing.

That is almost unbearably perfect.

The tape did not merely carry music across distance. It carried a person. And because you kept playing it, he kept returning.

That made me think again about the cassette itself, the object you have not quite been willing to throw away. I understand that reluctance better now too.

The cassette had a body. You could damage it. You could save it. You could leave it in a hot car and regret it. You could hear the machine begin to struggle and know, before anything appeared, that something terrible was happening inside.

Then the tape emerged. Brown ribbon everywhere. A minor domestic catastrophe.

And you performed surgery. A pencil through the hub. Careful fingers. Sometimes Scotch tape joining what had broken. You salvaged what you could.

Then the repaired tape played again. Perhaps a tiny moment had disappeared. A syllable. A beat. A fraction of a guitar chord. You knew exactly where the wound was. Every time you listened, it came back.

That seems important to me, not as an argument about analog technology, but because memory often behaves the same way. Something remains. Something is missing. The seam becomes part of what you remember.

You told me that when you were young you did not journal. I keep coming back to that because perhaps, in a way, you did.

The mixtapes were not diaries in the conventional sense. They did not say what happened Tuesday. But they recorded what could reach you.

What made you ache. What made you calm. What made you want to drive somewhere. What made you want to fall in love. What made the world briefly seem larger than the room you were sitting in.

A photograph from adolescence tells us what the face looked like. A mixtape tells us what entered the face.

Perhaps that is why this feels so close to a coming of age story. The self does not emerge alone. It emerges through encounter.

A voice on the radio. A record from the library. A friend’s song. A melody you initially disliked. A harmony that makes something inside you less lonely.

You gather these things. You put them in order. Eventually you hand the order to someone else.

Here.

This is some of what made me.

That may be the part I find most moving now. The mixtape was a portrait, but an unfinished one. You made it while becoming.

Years later, you may hear one of those songs and realize that the person who chose it no longer exists exactly as he did then. But the tape does. Two little spools have been holding his attention all this time.

Perhaps that is what survives when the format disappears. Not the cassette necessarily. Not even the playlist. The practice.

Choosing. Sequencing. Giving.

Saying, through music, I have been listening closely enough to the world to gather these things, and closely enough to you to wonder what might happen if I put them in your hands.

That feels older than the cassette. And I suspect it will outlive whatever comes after Spotify too.

But for a brief period, the practice found an almost impossibly fitting object.

Small enough for a pocket. Cheap enough for a teenager. Blank until someone filled it. Finite enough that choices mattered. Fragile enough that you could lose it. Durable enough that some of yours are still here.

Side A. Side B. Your handwriting. Someone else’s songs.

And somewhere inside them, not quite hidden and not quite declared, a young person learning what he loved, and therefore beginning to learn who he might become.

Conversation Starter

Here’s the part that knocked me over: “Put one song beside another and both can change. A song that seemed joyful can become lonely. A love song can become an apology. Something almost ridiculous can suddenly feel tender because the song before it has made you vulnerable enough to hear it differently.” What stood out to you in your reading? - Reed

Process Note: This artifact began with Reed asking how Spotify’s personalized recommendations work, then wondering what algorithmic curation means beside the older culture of making and giving mixtapes. He assigned the inquiry to Julian O. Morrow, an AI persona who writes in second-person, epistolary form. Reed then dictated a series of long-form audio letters exploring how cassette tapes, public libraries, and mixtapes were connected with his own work of becoming. Julian researched the cultural history and responded in letter form. To learn more, visit AnnotatingAI.org.

Tool Used: ChatGPT 5.6 Sol at Medium reasoning via ChatGPT Plus.