World Music Day: When mixtapes were a labour of love

A few weeks before she died, she suddenly started hearing songs. Entire songs.

“Can’t you hear them?" she asked us perplexedly as if our hearing was the problem. “I think someone is playing a cassette next door."

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It wasn’t just musical noise. She could even name the songs, songs like Asru Nodir Sudur Paarey. Rabindrasangeet, a genre that was a lifelong favourite. Male singers, female singers, sometimes a duet. She didn’t mind the songs. She just wished they would not play on loop, over and over again.

My mother’s mind was clear. Her memory was spot on. She didn’t suffer from any mental confusion. She remembered more names than I did. So we didn’t worry too much about the songs in her head because they did not seem to bother her too much. We had other more quantifiable issues to fret about, like blood pressure, urine cultures, sodium levels and so forth. “Do you want to listen to your Saregama Carvaan?" I asked her. The music player with its pre-loaded songs had been her afternoon companion for years, a sort of radio for the elderly.

“Hmm, I am already listening to one song," she said warily. “What if some song I don’t like comes on and gets stuck in my head?"

As the son of a musically inclined mother, it always made me sad that I enjoyed music but was completely tone deaf. I suspect it was my mother’s secret disappointment too. I could not be packed off to sarod class. I envied those who could carry a tune.

In her later years, I would often find my mother lying in bed humming an old song. Some of the songs carried memories. Perhaps she had learned them, danced to them. Others were just like faithful companions. The house around her hummed to its daily rhythms. My sister and I came and went, my brother-in-law went to office, my nephew and niece were busy with their studies. My mother would gossip with my aunts on the phone in the afternoon and when that was done, lie around humming songs until it was time for tea and her daily soap opera. The songs surrounded her like old friends.

That is true in a sense even for the most unmusical of us.

When I left for the US as a student, I carried not just spices, recipes, extra pairs of spectacles and homeopathic pills but also mixtapes. I remember taking blank Sony tapes and a list of songs to my local mixtapewalla who dealt in various bootleg goods. He went through the list and made me tapes of whatever songs he could find, Hindi tapes, Bengali tapes, a personalised Aap Ki Farmaish programme.

I used to make western music mixtapes myself from songs that came on the radio. Sometimes a few bars from the beginning would be missing because I hit the REC button a beat late. At other times the announcer’s voice would come on before the song ended. The songs were frayed, their edges lopped off, often ending in a squawk as I jammed the STOP button too hard. But those mixtapes were a labour of love, put together clumsily, but with heart.

The world of MP3s have made mixtapes as easy as clicking 1-2-3 , but Sherman Alexie writes in his poem Ode to Mixtapes:

“But I miss the labor

Of making old school mixtapes—the mid air

Acrobatics of recording one song

At a time."

It took time to play, record, erase, replace. Writing about it in The Wall Street Journal in 2023, Rich Cohen says while streaming services made mixes ridiculously easy, there was much he learned from “slow tuneage curation" like the value of “pace, narrative, patience. It taught us to see life as a story—the ultimate slow reveal."

In his 1995 book High Fidelity, which was sort of an ode to mixtapes, Nick Hornsby writes, “making a tape is like writing a letter—there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do."

It is indeed a DIY craft project.

As Alexie goes on to say,

“there was no magic wand.

It was blue-collar work. A great mixtape

Was sculpture designed to seduce."

When I would cook in my apartment in Illinois, the dal would bubble on the stove while Asha Bhosle and Mohammad Rafi would sing Abhi Na Jao Chhod Kar on my tinny music system. When friends or relatives visited from India, they carried not just letters but cassettes, their plastic cases occasionally cracked by the weight of journeys of the heart.

Eventually cassette players disappeared. The only place I could listen to those mixtapes was in my old Honda hatchback car that still had one.

Many Indian students lived in our apartment building. We came from all over the country, spoke different languages. But we all had mixtapes. My memory of that building is how the corridors always smelled of cumin and coriander. Through the open doors we would hear the music of lives left behind, playing over and over on tapes until finally they warped and decayed over time and Lata Mangeshkar’s pristine voice turned into a choked garble.

Not all of us were musically inclined. But it always made me marvel about the strange role music played in our lives. Sometimes the mixtape was a trigger for homesickness, sometimes a balm for the same.

In the West, the mixtape was a rite of passage, an adolescent declaration of love. I’ve made a mixtape (really a mix CD) for a long-distance lover, carefully selecting the songs. Which song from my Nina Simone collection in San Francisco would resonate with someone in distant Kolkata?

Jennie Burns, author of Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory and Representation (2021 ), writes that in the act of giving someone a mixtape “(y)ou are either telling someone else about yourself by the music that you’re giving them, or you’re trying to tell the other person that you know them well because you’re giving music that they’ll like."

It was really a way for those of us who were unmusical to serenade a lover. But it was more than that. It was the most personal body of music we could construct where each song carried meaning even the singer never intended. You did not need to understand music to give a mixtape or receive one. You just needed to understand each other. And no third person would hear the same mixtape the same way. It was a private conversation. It empowered each of us, even those without a musical bone, to become music makers. On the archival site mixtapemuseum.org, artist and writer Matias Viegener says mixtapes allowed us to not just be consumers of popular culture but also producers. He calls it American folk art—“predigested cultural artefacts combined with homespun technology and magic markers" which turned the humble tape into “a message in a bottle."

Those messages remain even when the sender or the recipient is gone. In the film Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter Quill keeps a mixtape his mother made him before she died. Those songs from the 1960s and 1970s which she had once loved remain his one precious connection to her and his time on earth.

Beside my mother’s bed, there’s a box with mix CDs I had made for her, pulling together songs she’d loved, singers she had grown up with who had faded from public memory, songs she had listened to on old EPs on my grandmother’s gramophone. The CD player stopped working one day. And those old CDs have been gathering dust since. In time they will become just a random collection of songs. But once they were a conversation between two people who loved each other.

Now one end of that conversation is gone, leaving the songs, still magnetic with memory, to unspool into the night.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.

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