Love is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

We made a lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walking the dog. I kept them all.

The first night we met, I told her the same thing I’ve told every single girl I’ve ever had a crush on: “I’ll make you a tape!” Except this time, with this girl, it worked.

For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screaming, “Pearl JAM! Pearl JAM! Now this is rock and roll!

We got righteously wasted and blasted David Bowie’s “Five Years” over and over. It’s a song about how the world is going to end in five years, which forces everybody to seize the freedom to do whatever they want, to act out their craziest desires and devour the moment and not even think about the future.

There are lots more where these came from. The drug tape. The commute tape. The dishes tape. The shower tape. The collection of good songs from bad albums you don’t ever want to play again. The greatest hits of your significant other’s record pile, the night before you break up. There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.

We listened to Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times. (Everybody’s favorite Prince album must be the first one they heard while actually making out.) I made her a tape called Cic-cone Island Baby. She made me a tape called Jumpin’ Sylvia Plath, It’s a Gas Gas Gas. It was love, obviously.

It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song—the acoustic ballad “Thirteen.” She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So, naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!”

So I left her stranded and went home to pace up and down the parking lot outside the subdivision, shivering in the cold with my Walkman, listening to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.” The ache in his voice summed up my mood, as he sang about a girl driving right past him, the kind of car that doesn’t pass you every day.

This girl was definitely an eighties girl. She had a tape with R.E.M.’s Murmur on one side and U2’s War on the other, another with The Velvet Underground & Nico backed with Moondance. Uh-oh, she also had a lot of XTC tapes. We’d have to work that out later.

We’d lived for just twenty-five years; we weren’t planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.

think about those days, and I think about a motto etched onto the sleeve of one of those Pavement singles: I AM MADE OF BLUE SKY AND HARD ROCK AND I WILL LIVE THIS WAY FOREVER.

We thought Martika’s “Love . . . Thy Will Be Done” was the musical-youth anthem of the mid-to-late spring of 1992. It wasn’t. We pitied the fools in New York and L.A. who had no idea Hi-Five were the world’s greatest rock and roll band. MTV wouldn’t touch this stuff. But what did they know?

The Word “Repulse”: I hate this word. I believe “repel” is a perfectly good word, and “repulsion” is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says “compulse” or “impulse” as a verb. So why would you ever say “repulse”? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renée looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I’m right. The Word “Utilize”: Even worse.

Renée saw the dog not as a personal victory for her, but as a huge favor

she was doing me by teaching me the joys of being pissed on by an animal. This is just one of the adorable quirks of the dog, the best friend God ever gave humanity in this crazy little world. Thanks, God!

That year, the music we loved had blown up nationwide. It was a little ridiculous how formerly underground guitar rock was crashing through the boundaries. More guitar bands than ever were making noise, and more of them than ever were worth hearing.

One night, before a special Seattle episode of Cops, the announcer said, “Tonight . . . in the city that gave us Pearl Jam . . . the cops are taking out the grunge!” Pathetic? Depressing? No. Awesome, we decided. Why not? We were easily amused. Maybe

Same girls, same summer nights, just different songs. Liz Phair was asking, “Whatever happened to a boyfriend?” and I would think, Well, some of us turn into husbands, and then nobody writes songs about us except Carly Simon.

Renée was a gal with many fantasies, but as far as I knew she never spent her time fantasizing about funerals, which was one of the millions of things I loved about her.

great Elizabeth Taylor movies, the gnarly-ass melodramas, there’s always the scene where she freaks out because she’s living inside a horrible secret she can’t explain? Liz in Butterfield 8: “You don’t know this. Nobody knows this.” Liz in Suddenly, Last Summer: “This you won’t believe. Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it.”

Individually, all the songs on this tape make me smile, but lined up in this order, they make me shudder.

I said goodbye to our dog Duane (who I gave away) and our favorite band Pavement (who broke up but whose members made excellent solo albums). Duane spent her last year with me barking and howling, wishing she were anywhere else; Pavement spent their last tour fighting onstage. At their final shows, the band members reportedly wore handcuffs onstage as symbols of their frustration. Each goodbye came with different levels of relief, guilt, and confusion, so I put them off as long as I could. But dogs need to run free,

I’ve never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they’ve shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

Last summer I took all of Renée’s hats to Central Park. I walked around the Great Lawn, leaving a hat every few benches. I thought of leaving a note on each hat saying, “This belonged to somebody very cool who loved hats, although she hardly ever wore them after the day she bought them, don’t get me started, and she loved this park, although she only came here once, in 1992, and we heard some guy with a banjo playing ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’ and she laughed because this guy had no idea he was getting a chance to sing it for a

There’s a lot I miss about the nineties. It was an open, free time of possibilities, changes we thought were permanent. It seemed inconceivable that things would ever go back to the way they were in the eighties, when monsters were running the country and women were only allowed to play bass in indie-rock bands. The nineties moment has been stomped over so completely, it’s hard to imagine it ever happened, much less that it lasted five, six, seven years.

Nirvana brought mass appeal back to guitar rock, and the mass appeal made the bands braver—some of them even had something to say about the real world, which is way more than anybody has a right to expect from musicians. A kind of popular song existed that didn’t before and doesn’t any more, as arty guitar bands seized the moment to communicate with huge numbers of fans and go to extremes and indulge their appalling drug-addled muses and say dangerous or dumb things and expand the emotional/musical languages with which people communicated.

I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.

I depend on my friends to remind me that what started in the nineties isn’t all dead, and the struggles of those years are not all lost, and the future is unwritten.

What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield.

Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.