The 80s Muxtape

The coming of summer usually means two very important things for me. The first is that I’ll get to go to the Jersey Shore. The second is that I get to make my Summer Mixes. The Summer Mix is a tradition that goes back to summer 2003 after my first year of college. Thanks to the magic of meeting a lot of new people, I acquired a vast amount of music that year. I had been doing the mp3 thing for a long while, but all the mixes I had made for driving were poorly constructed. I didn’t grow up in the real era of the Mixtape: the one John Cusack talks about in High Fidelity. I’m part of a generation that was growing up as CDs became popularized–a generation that experienced tapes, CDs, and digital downloads in our teen years. Digital downloads allowed us to burn Mix CDs, not mixtapes. But the novelty of amassing your favorite hits for listen in the car obscured the artform of the mixtape.

I attempted to rectify this that first year of college. My room had become the place to play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, so 80s radio was always on. I had enjoyed 80s music before this, but getting a hold of the whole soundtrack furthered my love of the era and sent me looking for more of the music that I had just missed growing up. I knew I wanted to make a good 80s mix to listen to in the car that summer. It needed not to just be my favorite 80s songs piled together, but it needed to have some sort of progression in the track order. After all, track order is just as important as song selection. Looking back, that first 80s Summer Mix was pretty weak—too many of the big hits surrounded by stuff from Vice City.

I also went about constructing a Summer Rock Mix and a Summer Rap Mix. The idea was that they had to be newish songs (within the last couple of years) that I had discovered within the year. So it wasn’t my favorite rap songs of all time, but rather a survey of what I listened to recently. I’ve kept up this tradition for five sets of Summer Mixes. I’m contemplating replacing the Rap Mix with a 90s Rock Mix, as I just haven’t really listened to hip-hop/rap this year. I’m excited about the 80s and Rock mixes, though. Both of them have gotten stronger over time.

Like thousands of other people, I recently discovered the website muxtape.com. It’s a place where you can upload up to 12 tracks into a single online mixtape, which others can listen to on the site in a Flash audio format. You can’t create fancy pages or multiple playlists—Muxtape is about simplicity. So in the spirit of loving 80s music and my excitement for the upcoming Summer Mix season, I’ve created a 12 track playlist of some of my favorite 80s songs. This was extremely difficult, considering it was hard enough for me to pair down a 9-hour long playlist for an 80s party last year. This mix isn’t representative of the breadth of my existing mixes nor does it try to throw in really obscure things to prove how cool I am. These are just Eighties tunes that I really love.

The 80s Muxtape

And keep your eyes and ears peeled for the straight up bokista muxtape.