A Mixtape. Photograph by Ramsey Beyer
Well, it’s not a perfect analogy, for starters because I put every song on the damn mixtapes I tend to play at the moment, but nevertheless, the little fuckers really can lull you into a false sense of security before exploding a shame-bomb all over you just when you’re starting to pat yourself on the back.
I have shitloads of old mixtapes, but precious few that I can play in company without that sneaking fear of the smugness of awesome old tunes by Lloyd Cole, will be completely shattered by a nasty Cranberries or Hootie and the Blowfish-style surprise.
It’s not the same as running the gauntlet of the randomiser on your iTunes library, because there are a million different ways in which stupid songs can turn up on there. Blaming the wife is probably the safest bet in my case, because there’s no fucking way I’d have put any Kylie songs on our computer of my own volition.
But mixtapes are different. You deliberately chose every song on there, at some point in your life, presumably thinking ‘yeah, yeah, that would be perfect after some Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci’. I know that emotionally healthy people are supposed to be over the concept of a guilty pleasure. What’s to be guilty about, after all, if you like something you like something, there’s no need to feel any shame about it. Shame about what?
And I think that’s the problem with old mixtapes. Not shame at the guilty pleasures, shame at the guilty treachery. The worst songs aren’t the ‘hey, fuck you with your sniggering, this is a great song, okay?’ moments, because we’re most of us tough enough to take those in our stride. You can’t be a devoted music fan without being ridiculed for liking something on a fairly regular basis, I suppose.
No, the worst ones, are the ones not where your friends heap you with scorn, but the ones where you yourself do it. Songs which you simply wouldn’t countenance listening to now under any circumstances. So I can handle being slagged off for The Dave Matthews Band* or the odd Big Head Todd and the Monsters tunes which turn up because despite the indie-shame, I still kinda enjoy those songs.
What I can’t handle is shite like the Cranberries, which makes me fucking cringe to even hear, these days. I mean seriously, it’s like I don’t know myself anymore, what kind of a person was I back then!
And maybe that’s the problem. We remember our pasts with fairly rose-tinted spectacles a lot of the time. You tell yourself things like ‘well I wasn’t all that cool at university, BUT…” or “I was young and kinda naive back then BUT…” and stuff like that. And then those blasted mixtapes rear their fucking heads and you wonder how the fuck you ever ended up with a Four Non fucking Blondes album in the first place, so that you even had the option of putting one of their god-forsaken song on a fucking mixtape at all.
It’s not so much that most of us ever thought we were cool to other people, but in your own way hopefully you were pretty cool to you. And these damn mixtape booby-traps remind you that even you wouldn’t have been that impressed with yourself, really. No buts about it. And that’s before you even think about the kind of shit you used to wear back then.
*Or the fucking Dave fucking Matthews fucking Band as they are officially known on this website.
