Love is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that’s what times do.

It’s too late to sleep anyway. The coffee’s gone cold, so I just heat up another pot. Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I’m a mix tape, a cassette that’s been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.

The country singers understand. It’s always that one song that gets you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.

There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.

When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with—nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.

The moment i knew i had to send this book to cody

But most of all, I regret turning thirteen, and staying that way for the next ten years or so. Every time I dig up one of the tapes from my adolescence, it’s like making the Stations of the Cross, reliving one excruciatingly bad move after another.

The words “douche” and “bag” have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-year-old self.

I had never made out, smoked, drank, broken a law, set fire to a car, vandalized a cemetery, or worn socks that matched. But I had the passion for rock and roll;

The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics,

I always envied my friends who had older siblings who could guide them through the teenage wasteland. They got a head start.

That night, I learned the hard way: If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy. If the girls don’t dance, nobody’s happy.

It was a painful night, but I got the message: Let the dancing girls dance. That’s the one ironclad rule of pop muzik, whether in New York, London, Paris, or Munich,

bitch power is the juice, the sweat, the blood that keeps pop music going.

Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don’t like the music, they sit down and stop the show. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show. And the girls are the show. We’re talking absolute monarchy, with no rules of succession. Bitch power. She must be obeyed. She must be feared.

“Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman,”

Camp Don Bosco was my first male peer group, and it was a shock to learn that boys were, in fact, dipshits.

In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.

my only experience with decadence was reading about it.

was young, idealistic, and reluctant to learn any of the ways of the world, even when it would have been to my advantage to do so. I was wasted, not on drugs, but on something possibly worse. I read an aphorism of Nietzsche’s, in which he says, “The man who despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” I laughed and said, Totally. That describes everybody I know, except me. It was time for a change.

I’ve been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I’m spinning through the same sounds I’ve been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I’ll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people?

Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until it’s too late.

Is there any scarier word than “irreversible”? It’s a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage—no backing up.

Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one. She had more energy than anybody I’d ever met. She was in love with the world. She was warm and loud and impulsive.

It was surprising to see how relieved she seemed whenever I told her how amazing she was.

If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now.

and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else.

Personics seemed incredibly high-tech at the time, but really, it was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.

The idea that we might not belong together never really crossed my mind.

I guess making little promises made us braver about the bigger ones.

Between the two of us, we had three master’s degrees, thousands of records, and no future.

That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don’t have another miserable person to worry about.

We were just a couple of fallen angels, rolling the dice of our lives. We’d heard all the horror stories of early marriages and fast divorces and broken hearts. But we knew none of them would happen to us, because as Dexy’s Midnight Runners sang to Eileen, we were far too young and clever. What if we just decide not to fall apart? What if we decide not to wait to see what happens, but instead decide what we want to happen and then decide how to make it happen?

Neither of us wanted to go crazy planning a wedding—we had our hands full planning the marriage.

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.

Dog love is blind. For that matter, dog love is stupid. Duane and I never would have tolerated each other if we’d had a choice. But what could we do? We were two animals in love with the same girl.

The songs were all either fast or sad, because all songs should be either fast or sad. Some of the fast ones were sad, too.

“Lots of people like me.” She crossed out “Lots of” and wrote “Enough.”

I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying.

she was the person I was going to be failing in front of for the rest of my life. It was just a little failure, but it promised bigger failures to come. Additional ones, anyway. But that’s who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love is so confusing; there’s no peace of mind.

I remembered how Renée used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn’t.

Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say.

But “widower” has that nagging “er” to remind you that you’re not just a bereaved spouse, but a failed husband. You failed your wife by not saving her, or not dying along with her or before her. You’re a widow with an asterisk.

You lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic.

But all the things you want to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn.

Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

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.