Outgoing Messages
If you’re under 45 and over 35, you made mix tapes. It’s a fact. A shameful, groan-inducing fact. It’s also a marker of your meta-ration; something self-referentially meaningful that no one did before and will most surely (and mercifully) never do again. Yet, despite their regretability score, mix tapes have become a point of pride for my peer group. We swoon about them, remembering how seamlessly “Separate Ways” led into “Take On Me.” We long for that Native Tongues tape with the best tracks from “Three Feet High and Rising” and “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm,” and that one good song the Black Sheep had. And how you got Soft Cell and The Velvet Underground on the same 90 minute Maxell is a mystery. But you did it, damn it! Somehow, though, mix tapes have become too well respected. Pop culturists have written treatises on the energy and effort that went in to composing them. Suddenly, making a mix tape is to making an iTunes playlist as pumping water from