Mixtape the Movie: A defense.
by Gina Arnold
My next book project is an anthology about independent record stores and the dear place they hold in our collective memory. I truly believe that such stores were, as I put it in the book, the best side of capitalism, but nothing’s perfect, and there is a scene in the new Netflix movie Mixtape that reminded me of their downside. In it, three teenage girls blackmail a snobbish indie record store owner by pretending they’ve found unhip music in his store’s racks and then squealing noisily with fake delight, thus driving his hipster clients out the door in disgust.
I love this scene (and the movie) for many reasons. First, it flips the gender of most record store aficionados (see High Fidelity) and gives the power back to the squealers. But it also acknowledges some hard truths about record stores of old. It may be hard to believe now that streaming has eliminated the concept of music snobbery, but record store denizens of 1999, the year when the movie is set, would have behaved in exactly this way. Hence, this scene provides both a critique and a fantasy antidote for a common thing I used to experience.
Back in the day, there were millions of stores like the one depicted in this movie, but the one that pops to mind for me is Rather Ripped, on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. It was snob city in there, and my feelings were hurt time and again by mean male clerks who put down my purchases. But here’s the thing. It never would have even occurred to me to make fun of their snobbery, or to drive their customers away by pretending I’d found a Britney Spears CD in the rack as their punishment. Instead, I tried to conform to their snobbery, and of course later on replicated it in the pages of the local Berkeley paper I wrote for.
The rest of my personal story is rather sad, but that is the opposite of the story being told in Mixtape, because in the film, these little girls see right through the record store patrons’ pretensions and use it against him. The movie may be set in 1999, but the self-awareness of the little girls in it is pure 2021.
Mixtape tells the story of a 13-year-old orphan, Bev, who finds a mixtape made by her deceased parents and sets out to find out all about them through the songs on it. To begin her quest, Bev goes to an indie record store to seek help, and leaves knowing “Mixtape Law,” which is that you have to listen to the songs in the order they were recorded, because they are delivering a personal message.
Here’s the thing that doesn’t get explained in the movie, but which you’d know automatically if you happened to have lived through that age. The owner of the record store, who calls himself Anti, only helps her find the songs because her parents had such good taste. Does this mean that he would not have helped her had her parents listened to shitty music — if, for example, she was seeking the song “Lights” by Journey instead of “Teacher’s Pet” by the Quick?
Yep. If her parents liked Journey, he would have snubbed her, orphan though she was. Anti makes gentle fun of Bev’s parents’ medium, the cassette and the Walkman. But he doesn’t make fun of their listening practices. One of the truthiest truths observed in this movie is that it is only because her mix tape has the Stooges, Roxy Music and the Kinks on it, that Anti goes to the trouble. THAT is the real mixtape law, and that is also what this movie is secretly exploring.
Well — that and the past, in general, the past, as writ through its audio technologies. Because in addition to being a sappy coming of age story, Mixtape is also a comment on music technologies and the hold they had on all of us, back in the days before streaming services and the concept of shuffle changed our consumption habits. That is why the film HAS to be set in 1999, the last moment before such a quest would become needless. In fact, at one point, they turn to Napster to search for a song, but in 1999, Napster was more fallible.
Napster really came into its own in 2000, and apres la, le deluge: ipods, itunes, Spotify, Bluetooth, and those cool bone-conducting headphones you can even wear while you’re swimming. Those things, not the music, changed everything. No longer do we define ourselves by the music we listen to, and no longer do we have to make mixtapes. In fact, that realization is what makes Mixtape, which is (like all “rock ’n’ roll saved my life” narratives) extremely sunny and non-toxic, a little bit melancholy. That, and the other little subplot, which is that the reason Bev’s grandmother refuses to tell her anything about her mother — thus setting off her quest — isn’t because she’s a huge meanie, but because she is still grieving her daughter so hard that she can barely speak her name.
Mixtape is bittersweet, because it is set in a country we can never revisit, a country that is gone for good. The movie illustrates our losses, not only in the details like cassette tapes and giant computers, but also in the way that adults behave around the kids. For example, it’s hard to picture a movie today showing a forty-year-old man sneaking three teenage girls into a gig without it implying all kinds of other awful stuff, but this movie is a reminder that yes, prior to the invention and widespread adoption of Pornhub, Tinder, and roofies, the world really used to be that way: people would boost you into nightclubs without demanding some kind of creepy payback, just out of the goodness of their hearts.
Or because your parents loved the Quick, one or the other.
