An ode to the mixtape
It may seem strange to kids today, but back in the late 1980s, getting access to music was an onerous and time-consuming task. When the place was Islamabad and the music in question was Western, matters got even more complicated.
There was only one radio station and one state-run television channel, PTV. It sometimes played good movies, but hardly any music.
There were also only a handful of music stores in Islamabad. It was a time when Pakistan was recovering from a decade of religious extremism, censorship and a war in the neighbourhood.
Islamabad was a quiet, small bureaucratic town where everybody took themselves too seriously. Occasionally the stillness could be interrupted by a rogue rocket landing in the driveway (ala Ojhri Camp incident), but these incidents were few and far between.
It was the city of stiff upper lip bureaucrats and it seemed there were far more important things on people’s minds than figuring out where to get one’s hands on some rock’n’roll music.
In this bleak scenario came MTV — like an oasis in the desert. My exposure to the music channel came in the unlikeliest of places — Gujranwala Cantonment in 1988.
My mamoo was posted there in the army and my cousins had somehow managed to get their hands on a videocassette that featured two music videos from a channel called MTV.
It was there that I saw my first few videos: ‘One’ by Metallica and ‘Rocket’ by Def Leppard. These were the latest popular bands at the time and I was hooked. I needed to get my hands on that music and somehow tap into this magical channel.
The only source of somehow getting all this music in one place was the mixtape.
Now, the concept of the mixtape differs somewhat between Pakistan and the West. In the West, the mixtape served mainly as a conversation between two lovers. One would put on tape a selection of songs about love, life and everything in between that would convey what they were feeling.
The mixtape was the audio documentation of a relationship — from its glorious initiation to its muddled and depressing dissolution.
The writer Nick Hornby talks about the mixtape extensively in his 1995 novel High Fidelity. The book is about a record store-owner who spends most of his time making top-five music lists and mourning the end of his relationship with his girlfriend. Through his character, Hornby describes the detailed process of properly making a mixtape:
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again... A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got to Get You off My Mind,' but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and... oh, there are loads of rules."
In Pakistan, the mixtape meant something less romantic entirely.
Due to budgetary constraints, most young music listeners could not just go and buy entire albums by artists. They had to be selective, and that meant handing over a blank cassette to an audio store with a selection of songs that the audio store would tape and put together from separate albums.
Even if budgets did allow, back then I didn’t know any girls who were into any of the music I was. The only conversation taking place between boys and girls was about some random useless talk of the day — nothing about rock’n’roll or discussing the merits of Slash as a guitar player.
There was also the dread and fear that parents would discover that a boy had given a girl a mixtape and both parties would be condemned to eternal purgatory.
However, putting together a good mixtape was not easy. It required thought, time and good knowledge of the different music contained within.
Mixtapes could not be put together randomly — they had to be curated carefully so nothing seemed out of place and each track could seamlessly flow into the next.
The mixtape was akin to the ultimate album — different artists coming together from varied styles and backgrounds to collectively fuse into one glorious mix.
Within the confines of two short sides of a cassette, and the limited music selection that the late 80s music shops in Islamabad had to offer, we distilled a one-of-a-kind soundtrack.
The first mixtape that my music-obsessed brothers and I curated and put together was aptly titled Selection 1.