High Fidelity

My friend Grace has asked me to make her a mix tape. As soon as she suggested it I thought of the movie (ok, and book) High Fidelity, where record shop owner Rob has to assemble a mix tape for his then girlfriend:

To me, 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. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention...

I like music. I am almost always with it, when I work I indulge, and quite frankly, I almost always use it in the definition that I create for myself. Right now I'm listening to Pop Art by the Pet Shop Boys (they write the best pop music and Pop Art has great minimalist album art) and exulting in the news that Jack Johnson is coming to the UK in March. I am hypocritically intolerant of overly manufactured music, submerge myself in fine lyrics and can air-guitar every note of Dire Straits live album Alchemy. I like a lot of my collection, but are willing to accept that there are too many greatest hits (the Stone Roses, Bob Dylan, the Jam, Bob Marley and Neil Diamond spring to mind) in my collection, especially where those collections are the only body of work by those artists, and there are a few too many lemons (TWO albums by the Corrs, but then they do look good, and Orbital's The Altogether, which I could not get into despite loving Illuminate, which I heard in a CD shop in Auckland in 2000). There are two hundred plus albums in there and I have to get fourteen songs down. This is a lot of pressure here. It's like a little window on my soul. I gotta be true to myself but I've also got to make a balanced tape that she will actually want to listen to. Man, I hope she likes this...

I'm thinking about that opening corker, and I'm thinking The Go! Team's Panther Dash. I'm also wondering if there is some room for some of Taylor Mali's poetry, who incidentially is coming to Oxford next month just to compere a Hammer and Tongue slam. How sweet is that? then I'm thinking some Frausdots and the Beta Band's Dry the Rain. But the rest of it, blimey, that is going to take some thinking...

Usefully the web is crawling with stuff about this process and there are some instructions on making a mix tape here.