song for a mixtape

Currently reading: Love is a Mixtape, by Rob Sheffield. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. It's the best kind of memoir: rich and interesting and funny and sad. Also, it is about mixtapes, which (for the kids in the audience) are a historically obscure phenomenon in which people made tapes for each other, usually as part of an elaborate courting ritual.

"We music fans love our classic albums, our seamless masterpieces, our Blonde on Blondes and our Talking Books. But we love to pluck songs off those albums and mix them up with other songs, plunging them back into the rest of the manic slipstream of rock and roll. I'd rather hear the Beatles' "Getting Better" on a mixtape than on Sgt. Pepper any day. ... When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free." (24)