044: Mixtape

Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity," boys/boyishness, Briahna Joy Gray, finding our people & why we should stop shaming men + Doodle Dispatches & cool Substack recs

My desert-island, all-time, top five, most favorite things about being GenX, in chronological order:

1. Riding in those fold up seats they used to put in the back of station wagons

2. Having a teen line that was listed in a printed phone book

3. Mixtapes

4. Thinking we could avoid “selling out”

5. Radiohead

Of these, the one I wish I could get back is mixtapes. I loved mixtapes, even in the early days before I got a dual cassette player, when I had to wait for the song I wanted to come on the radio and then race to press the record and play buttons down at the same time. Later, when I had slightly more control of the content, I was extremely into the subliminal message kind of mixtape for which you picked the songs and order of songs to convey a subtle (or not so subtle) message to your recipient. I remember balancing the “I want you” energy of Yaz’s “Don’t Go” with the “we’re friends, but maybe something else, too,” of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” and feeling certain that its intended recip…