Essential artists of the mixtape era

The whole world changed the day you realized you could hook up your record turntable to a cassette deck and make a tape compilation of your favorite music. When that tape became portable via boomboxes and Walkmen, those mixes became the soundtrack to your life. At some point, we called them "mixtapes" and we began making piles of them for ourselves and our friends/boyfriends/girlfriends/etc. As Nick Hornby wrote in "High Fidelity," making a mixtape was "like writing a letter." It was a unique, h...

Read full article Share article