To Here Knows When

A year or so ago, I found myself thinking about music I had listened to as a kid, but had long since sold, thrown out, taped over, lost, or otherwise scrubbed out of consciousness. The initial plan was to download the songs and create a Mix CD that functioned as a haunted semi-nostalgic tour through my own memories, one which could be sonically evocative through neural frequencies in the temporal lobe long after I had the capacity to psycho-navigate the time-space of my own lived experience. In shorts, tracks which would trigger an emotional response on impulse, however locked and guarded the memories surrounding them were.

But when considering what would go on an 80 minute CD-R, I realized that certain songs recalled precise moments in time (such as a car ride, a date, a school year, a finite relationship) and space (the apartment I lived in, the club I first heard it in). Others spanned years and encompassed different meanings throughout the disparate time periods, but were each attached to either a moment of discovery or a time period through which a song graduated from being an arbitrary node on an endless setlist to a canonical factor in the development of a sonic self, a time when a known song became either new or common. Contrary to the current predilection for a time that is out of joint, time for me on these recordings was set, inescapable.

Back when mixtapes were an actual thing, I took delicate care to thoughtfully assemble them. This is something that the digital age doesn’t easily accommodate, particularly with the breadth of music available at any given point. I still try to direct a narrative when creating Mix CDs, but now their major purpose seems to be storage- a way to contain all this new data.

In effort to reclaim the old spirit of the mixtape, I decided to invest in a Documentary Mixtape process. There would be a total of 29 CD-Rs in all, one for each year. Compiling this series would involved a great deal of investment and research, but my initial aim was completely personal- a gift and scrapbook for myself. It was only recently, after stumbling upon journalistic blogs like Pushing Ahead of the Dame, Freaky Trigger, and the Between the Grooves series at PopMatters that I considered doing write-ups for each and every tune on the mix CDs. In general, I abhor music criticism which incorporates a writer’s personal experience with music, an unnecessary crutch used by writers insecure about their (inter)subjectivity, but I was greatly entertained by Steven Hyden’s Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? series at the A.V. Club and was taken by the possibilities of applying this kind of intersubjectivity to my own project.

The discs are not completed just yet. I’m into the 20s now, but now’s as good a time as ever to start. I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, though I am relying in large part on the unscientific apparatus of memory. Being that I don’t possess a great deal of recollections of what transpired in my life before the age of five, the first couple of mixtapes are a mosaic of songs popular on the radio during the year in question, songs that became important later than the year of their release, songs I associate with my parents and older siblings, and songs tied to other media (particularly films). I will attempt to parse personal anecdotes with genuine criticism, historical context, and interpretation. Not all songs will be related to the year in question, but each will have some kind of significance to the year in question. Since I was only alive for 16 days in 1981, year zero will be 1982. And since this project will likely not be completed for another year or so, we might as well make an even 30.

I hope someone besides me finds value in these entries. My aim is for accuracy, to record what I actually was listening to, rather than what I wish I was listening to. The only music I've excluded is music that I've created myself (all of which can be found at Timhtunes) to avoid turning this into even more of a vanity project and to save space for other music. Thereby, I will laying bear all my unhip tendencies, my regretful periods, and my general fickleness. No part of me will be spared.