Good Morning Folks! Welcome to the second week in a row of this new series of Mixtapes. For those who have not followed this series, essentially the idea is that each Monday morning, I share a new mix of songs with you. Growing up, mixtapes were very important to my existence. I was blessed with a stereo that had a double cassette deck, and I quickly realized that I could remix my favorite albums into combinations that made sense for me personally. Later on, I would share these mixes with friends, and occasionally love interests… that rarely seemed to appreciate the gravity of what I was giving them. For me, each mix is like a little chunk of my soul that I am carving off to share with you, and everything about them was labored over, from the choice of songs to the order in which they appear. During the pandemic lockdown era I started sharing these takes with you, my readers, and more recently, while dealing with my “cancer boy” era, I have started this back up, and while I am sure I will miss the occasional Monda,y I am hoping to keep this feature of my blog rolling for a while. As of this morning, there are twenty-five different mixtapes available, and you can find all of them on the archives page.
25 – Some Jokes Kill
Oftentimes, one of my mixes starts with a specific song that serves as the anchor. I then built the mix around that song, with it buried somewhere in the middle. This week’s spark of inspiration is Heathens by Twenty One Pilots, and was heard on Edge 104.5 while running some errands. I’ve always liked this song because it was so interesting and largely denied trying to place it in any clean category musically. This made it all the more challenging to build a mix of songs that evokes the same sort of feelings, because it doesn’t neatly fit into a box. This song was used in the soundtrack for Suicide Squad, and while piecing this together, a subtheme of the Joker started creeping in around the edges. While I don’t exactly love the Jared Leto Joker, when I think of the Suicide Squad movie, I think of Joker as a character in general. When I think of The Joker, however, I think of The Killing Joke, which is what ultimately inspired the album cover for this one. At face value, this is a weird mix of tracks, but it flows together far better than it might seem. I’m pretty happy with the end result and proud of this one.
Two weeks in a row, friends… let’s see if I can keep it going for a third week. I’m never terribly great at keeping a feature going for the long haul. At some point, I tend to run out of inspiration, and I know that I will either be dealing with Chemo/Radiation or a Surgery soon… which will probably knock the wind out of my sails a bit. I have the first several songs for the next mix ready to go, because it was inspired by one of my friends. This one took a bit of doing to make it work, so I am hoping since I already have three songs that fit together neatly that the next mix will come together easier. If you are enjoying the return of Mixtape Mondays drop me a line below. If you have listened through all of my Mixtapes, pat yourself on the back for being a true pal… but still drop me a line because I am curious if anyone has done this thing. As always, you can find all of the mixtapes… often times ahead of my Monday morning post over on the archive. I tend to stage things ahead of time so I can share them with friends to help beta test them a bit.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Some Jokes Kill appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Long time readers of my blog might remember a reoccurring feature called Mixtape Mondays, and in theory I am hoping to bring it back. Essentially growing up the creation of Mixtapes was very important to me. I would painstakingly spend hours going over specific tracks and dubbing them onto a cassette with my stereo until I had crafted the perfect flow of songs that followed a sequence and more or less fit a theme. I would give them to friends… and attempt to bestow them upon lovers, who so rarely appreciated them. However that was not the important part. The important part was crafting what I felt was the perfect sequence of songs that fit into the album format, and more importantly than anything… looped in a way that made sense to be able to listen to it over and over. Over the course of April 19th, 2021 through May 9th, 2022 I released twenty three of these mixtapes, and you can see the entire archive over on the dedicated page. These all sort of represent a piece of my soul, and if you ever want to know anything about me as a person… they are written clearly in these assemblages.
Erasure Shaped Box
I’ve talked a bit about my romantic interest on this blog a few times with the code word of “Erasure”, this is in large part because she really likes that band. I gave her some hopeless homework some time ago, where I asked her to listen through my mixtapes as a way of understanding me a bit better. Unfortunately she is not the sort of person who really listens to disparate assemblages of music, but instead prefers to listen to the same song over and over until it is worn out… before moving on to the next song. So I set out with a rather hopeless mission, of trying to craft a mixtape that I thought she might like. Turns out she did enjoy it mostly, or at least enjoys some of the songs on it. However it was more thought experiment than anything else. Could I craft a mixtape that I also enjoyed centered around a song from Erasure the band, not the person… and make something I would enjoy listening to. I think at least in the later mission I succeeded because I have been listening to this one quite a bit lately. The catalyst was Chains of Love, and then I worked forward and backwards from that song trying to assemble a sequence that makes sense.
Track List
01 – Lips Like Sugar – Echo and the Bunnymen
02 – Space Age Love Song – A Flock of Seagulls
03 – Why Can’t I Be You? – The Cure
04 – World In My Eyes – Depeche Mode
05 – International Bright Young Thing – Jesus Jones
That brings to a close the first of this new batch of Mixtapes. I have no clue how long I will keep this run going, because I have a ton of things going on in my life right now. However there is something about crafting a Mixtape that I find deeply satisfying. I usually start with 30-40 songs and then whittle it down to just the right blend of 13-15 while trying to perfect a sequence in which they flow together nicely. I was driving home yesterday from a trip to Harbor Freight and heard a song on the radio that I have not heard in years, and I think that is probably going to serve as the nugget for the next mix. I would love for this to regularly return to my blog, but I am never certain how much inspiration I will be able to keep going. As always however you can see the entire sequence of all of my mixtapes over on the archive.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. For those of us in the US, it was Mother’s Day and I hope that went off swimmingly for everyone. Me… well we spent some time on the side of a very busy turnpike because we had a spectacular flat. For anyone who might not be used to this feature of my blog, Mixtape Mondays are where I create a number of mixtapes and share them with you. As a kid, I was a prolific maker of mixtapes and loved the structure of lining up songs in a specific order to convey a feeling. The original series ran for 20 episodes before I ran out of creative juice, and now we are on week three of this revival. Who knows how long I will keep it going this time, but I still have a bit more ammunition ready to go.
Contextual Rickroll
The internet has a proud tradition of bait and switch tactics, and one of the proudest of these traditions is hyping something up and then linking the Never Gonna Give You Up video by Rick Astley. I am not sure why this one artifact of a bygone age came to represent the epitome of cringe, but it did. However too often it seems like folks view this one video as some sort of isolated incident or an odd happening that makes no sense. However friends… I am here to tell you that the theme song of the Rickroll, was absolutely an element of the times in which the song was created. I’ve kicked around the notion of creating a playlist for a while that places the song in its proper conditions. When I was in seventh grade I had fairly major sinus surgery and spent quite a bit of time laying in the hospital. Given that I grew up with cable… and as a result without MTV… I consumed as much as I could possibly watch. Never Gonna Give You Up was a new song at this time, and I present to you the auditory landscape of this era.
That friend brings to close the third Mixtape Monday in this new series. I can’t say that I am going to be listening to this one a ton, but it served a very specific purpose. Think of this as an auditory time capsule to place the Rickroll in its original context. For those who might be finding this as your first Mixtape Mondays post, I keep an archive of all of the mixtapes I have created shown below. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and I hope I manage to finish up a few more mixes before next Monday.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you had an excellent weekend. Last week was fairly dominated with guide posts about Mastodon/Fediverse, but hopefully this week we can get back to the regular sorts of nonsense that I provide. Today however I am bringing you the second new mix of what I am at least mentally thinking of as “season 2” of this project. For anyone tuning today fresh, I was one of those kids who constantly made mixtapes for myself and for my friends… even used them as a wildly ineffective way of trying to flirt. There is something about the art of placing songs in a specific order that I love, and I even go overboard enough to create some custom fake album art.
Immaculately Overwhelmed
Something that I realized in the time between my previous mixtape spree and now, is that I never really plumbed the depths of Emo Rock. I was way the fuck too old to adopt this as a style and way of life, but I spent plenty of time listening to this music. While as a Gen X I mostly viewed Emo as a resurgence of the Goth roots of The Cure and Bauhaus mixed through the party hard ethic of Blink-182. The end result was an extremely enjoyable rock phase from the mid to late 2000s. As frat rock began to fade it was replaced by this more deeply introspective version that honestly I related to quite a bit more. The scene kids that followed, even felt quite a bit like my little skater punk era. It is funny as you age, how you can clearly seen the connective fabric between different movements in music and culture. The only problem is you age out of being relevant to the oncoming generation, and as such those attempts at wisdom fade into the void. The cycle repeats for eternity.
Track List
Well folks that is it for another round of Mixtape Mondays. I hope this playlist hits the spot as much as it did for me. This would be number twenty two in total, and for those just now catching up you can check out the full list over at my archive page. I have a few mixes that are in a fluid state right now, and I will need to spend some time this week to dislodge them from the logjam they are in currently. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and we will continue this nonsense next week.
