HISTORY MIXTAPES - A Stealth Labor History of Mixtapes with Austin McCoy (Part I)

In this episode, historian Katherine Rye Jewell and  historian Austin McCoy use their parents' record collections to interrogate the personal meanings of various music formats—from vinyl to cassettes to CDs—and their influence on their musical sensibilities . They discuss the role of mixtapes in hip hop and punk cultures, their significance in creating connections within underground scenes, and their transformation into digital playlists. The conversation highlights how their parents' music collections influenced their tastes, and how mixtapes served as a medium for artistic and emotional expression. The episode also explores the historical context of mixtape culture, its evolution, and its commercial aspects. Jewel and McCoy reflect on the emotional bonds forged through these music formats, encouraging listeners to share their own mixtape experiences. 

This is part I of our conversation with Austin McCoy, and check out our collectively created playlist.

Also quoted in this episode: 

Diamond, Michael, and Adam Horovitz. Beastie Boys Book. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Masters, Marc. High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

Chapters

• 0:43 The Art of Making Mixtapes
• 1:22 Personal Music Influences
• 2:04 Exploring our Parents' Music
• 6:42 Evolution of Formats
• 16:44 Mixtapes in Punk and Hip Hop
• 20:17 The Cultural Significance of Mixtapes

Transcript

Kate Jewell: 0:02

In the Beastie Boys book, Adam Horowitz writes,"Anyone who's trying to convince you that tapes are cool and that iPhones are corny is dead wrong. I can tell you from experience and with a professional's opinion, the cassette versus vinyl versus CD versus MP three argument is boring.... Being able to scroll and click to get to the next song is a wonderful new feature. To me," he writes,"the only thing that's really missing with the iPhone is that physical relationship to your music....If I added it up, I feel like I've wasted 261 solid hours of my life just watching cassette tapes, rewinding and fast forwarding there was no drag and drop onto a playlist to make a mixtape." He continues, and if the tape you were making was meant to be a gift for someone. It took serious focus. It was really just about sharing songs via cassette. It's way bigger than that. Artistic decisions, emotional decisions, and depending on who you're making it for, strategic decisions went into this. He concludes"Making, listening to and caring for cassettes is the most hands-on and personal music listening experience. For sure. You don't just listen. You're very involved. Mixed tapes are super important in the history of hip hop and punk, both in connecting underground scenes and in making the culture go commercial. My guest and I today talk about that, but we do something else. We were very small children, babies, even when the Beastie Boys were putting out demos or scenes and labels were forming thanks to the humble cassette tape. More instrumental in our musical upbringing amidst all of these format changes were our parents, at least before we could get access to the more illicit albums possessed by friends' older siblings, or recorded for us onto mixed tapes by crushes. In this episode, I talk with historian Austin McCoy, and it's the first part of a longer conversation in which we explore how to think about the influences that shape our musical sensibilities not just as historians, but also as creative people or just music fans in general. And the key influence that we're gonna focus on is our parents' music collections. So think of today's episode as a think piece on the pieces of vinyl and plastic that delivered our tunes as we reflect on how the rapid change from vinyl to cassette to CD shaped our younger selves' ideas about musical influence and personalization of our private soundscapes. I have some theories I'm developing in these conversations. Deep down, I think we're all a mix of various music listening types. They can change based on the setting. But for today, the real question is what format best suits your style of listening? Who are you deep down: vinyl, cassette, or cd? Are you recording mix tapes off of college, radio stations, or commercial radio, or burning mixed CDs, or sitting in a perfect environment listening to a long playing vinyl album. What sensibilities do you bring to the hyper-personalized world of digital streaming out of the era of musical scarcity? This episode may raise more questions than it answers, but I hope you enjoy the exploration, and please leave a comment telling me about the best themed mixtape you ever made.

3:21

Welcome to the History Mixtapes, a podcast about when music and history meet. I'm Katherine Rye Jewel, a historian of the business and politics of culture, an author of Live From the Underground, a History of College Radio.

Austin McCoy: 3:36

My name is Austin McCoy and I am an assistant professor at West Virginia University. I teach classes on, 20th century US history, African American history, labor history, popular culture, especially hip hop. In terms of my research, I am working on two books. The academic book, under advanced contract with University of North Carolina Press is a study of Midwest progressivism from 1967 to 1989. And then my second book is under contract with Simon and Schuster, and that's on De La Soul, hip hop group, and their contributions to Black culture and US culture from 1989 until the present.

Kate Jewell: 4:19

Listeners may not know that this is one of many conversations that we have at least started to have music and connections with history. I think at one point I realized not only have both of our families been instrumental in shaping our musical sensibilities from a young age, I think I realized that our dads are the same age. That's possible. So he was born in 1949.

Austin McCoy: 4:43

yeah

Kate Jewell: 4:43

So I think that was where the idea that I had came from of us comparing the music that our dads listened to. But I know that your mom was also equally instrumental in, in shaping your musical life. And my mom is very responsible for my classical music

Austin McCoy: 4:59

Mm.

Kate Jewell: 4:59

Was a, she started college as a French Horn major and as a classical musician. And then became a journalist and a writer. But she's responsible for that side of my musical life. And also my deep in abiding love for the Monkees. But, uh, because she gave me her record from when she was a kid that I listened to a lot, it was like my, my, my own record that I got in third grade. So I gave you the same task as I've given everybody of producing a mix tape, but with this very personal angle to it about the music that you grew up with and where that came from.

Austin McCoy: 5:36

My mom, she was the person that introduced me to a lot of music. Obviously they were both into music. I think they shared the same taste. But mom was more I think excited about it, at least when I was younger, watching who was doing the singing and who was nodding the head and all that stuff. Like she was more animated. But then also, I learned that she was a performer. She used to sing with a local band in Mansfield. I didn't know this until after she passed away. It all then clicked into place, right? Where it was just like, watching and listening to her sing, her enthusiasm for the music. Like even, into the late stages of her life, where she was probably not collecting as much music as they had when they were younger. But I found a notebook where she was like writing out all the artists who she wanted to buy their albums. So she was always thinking about collecting music and enjoying it. It was really her who pushed my music appreciation.

Kate Jewell: 6:41

I am curious if your parents underwent a format shift. My dad was a records guy and I have, I have, his records downstairs.'cause eventually he gave up records. He doesn't listen to vinyl anymore. There was a while there where he switched to tapes and he was recording a lot of his vinyl onto cassette and he had this, he worked for a while at the Congregational Library in Boston, before he became a minister. And he had a card catalog, like the old wooden ones, and they perfectly fit cassette tapes. And so it's like this amazingly wonderful tactile memory that I have as a kid of opening that wooden card catalog with the cassettes rattling in them.

Austin McCoy: 7:25

I guess this is where we say that if you're a music collector or a collector of anything, you're also a historian in many ways. I think it was Dan Charnis who published an article, it might have been New York Times where he argues that many of the hip hop DJs were also archivists and historians, and this totally makes sense. And I think just even thinking about our parents collecting music and keeping catalogs, like I say, even with my mom keeping a catalog of all the artists that she wanted to buy. I think this is a thing that historians do, at least those you know of us who are also collectors. I think my parents, yes, they underwent a shift in the form of music that they purchased, which probably a lot of people, so when I was younger, they, I remember they had a record collection. But I was really young, I can only remember a few records that they had. I can't remember the size of the record collection. I can only imagine that they had the records that they wanted to have, right? Whether it is Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. They were very much fans of the Jackson family. So they had Jermaine Jackson's records as well. There was one record that where he is like wearing this black, almost militant outfit standing in front of it looked like a gated mansion. And it's like very dark. And that record cover scared me. It just looked scary. Like it was just like, what is this? My mom was in the Air Force, so we moved a few times and when we moved to Ohio from Florida, we left a lot of stuff. And I think the records were probably in the, in that stuff. But, if that was 1990 when we moved to Ohio, they were also buying a lot of tapes. I still actually have a decent amount of my parents' tapes actually. I have a Cameo tape, Sade, The Spinners Greatest Hits, Earth, Wind and Fire tapes. I still have a decent amount of their tapes, and this is, so they were getting, my mom was buying tapes in the eighties and early nineties, and I think into the nineties, like a lot of people, shifted to CDs. But I think as my parents got older, they had to work more and they had less time to listen to music. So most of the time when they listened to music, I think it was in the car, I don't think they ever drove a car with a CD deck, so it was all tapes. So the CDs were played at home, obviously when they had vinyl that was played at home too. But yeah, CDs were played at home. The tapes were in the car. I think my mom listened to those more than the CDs.

Kate Jewell: 10:52

I could just say that, as somebody who experienced both, listening to cassettes in the car is vastly preferable to listen to the CDs in the car because you could just throw the cassette into the, you know, well of the seat next to you and it would not get damaged unless something terrible happened. And it was such more of a durable way. Whereas the CDs, people would have remember the people would have like the books of CDs in their car and like, like flipping. And I'm like, this is dangerous. Just grab the mix tape,

Austin McCoy: 11:21

That's what I did. There was a point where, yeah, when I started driving, I was driving my parents' car and they had tape decks. And I was just listening to mix tapes. Part of that is we know, right? Like one, if you have a decent amount of CDs, you're not gonna carry them everywhere. So there's no way to be mobile with parts of your music collection. And then you also want to listen to the songs you wanna listen to. So yeah, I was a habitual mixtape maker, and then I think once I got a car and I put a CD deck in, then I had CDs because I didn't have any way to play tapes. But I also was able to make mixed CDs. But I had a book of them. But no, you're right, at you're making your choice at the beginning of the drive, make the choice then, or unless you had a five disc changer. I knew some people who had that, but,

Kate Jewell: 12:07

I remember the people who had them, like they were in their trunk and they would go back in and all this is coming back to me. But a lot of the mix tapes I listened to, especially in high school, because I didn't have many albums on cassette. I had some, I had a lot of cassette singles, which I'm like a very niche

Austin McCoy: 12:22

yeah.

Kate Jewell: 12:22

For that.

Austin McCoy: 12:23

that is,

Kate Jewell: 12:24

It's for a particular reason'cause growing up in Vermont a mall was two hours away, so the nearest Strawberries was like down in like Holyoke, Massachusetts. So the only store that I could get to on a regular basis was at the the Powerhouse Mall in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. And there's one store there that sold cassette singles. And then I would take the cassette singles and I would make put them on mix tapes alongside recordings from my dad's record collection. So a lot of my mix tapes came from his vinyl. So what you might be asking were the songs that made their way from my dad's vinyl collection onto mix tapes. He had the standard rotation of somebody who graduated from high school in 1967 of Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the Love and Spoonful, even a Led Zeppelin album. But I also gravitated towards cuts from the feminist folk group, ches, proco, harem, and the, of course, the band. And when I would make mixtapes for friends, it was always some kind of remix of his record collection. But my dad never made mix tapes. He was always recording the albums onto tapes so that he could take them in the car.

Austin McCoy: 14:48

Yeah, that makes sense. Making mix tapes takes a long time. So if you have a 60 minute tape, it's gonna take you more than 60 minutes, 90 minutes, right? Like you have to have the time to do it. So it makes sense that your dad is going to just record the album straight up because, yeah, you just press play and record, and you drop the needle and you can walk away from it. Whereas with us, we are teenagers, we have more time. We're not trying to work. We're not writing books, we're not doing any of that stuff. We have that time to make multiple tapes a day if you'd like to, which is wild to even think about now, because

Kate Jewell: 15:23

had to sit and listen to the whole

Austin McCoy: 15:25

right, right,

Kate Jewell: 15:26

you need it.

Austin McCoy: 15:27

Exactly. Exactly. And it, and if you wanted to get fancy with it and cut off after certain verses or try to do something where you're you're blending things a little bit, then that takes a lot of time and detail. So yeah, we had a lot of time is what we had a lot of time to think about, how we were going to arrange songs and, am I gonna make it 120 minute tape or a 90 minute tape? And like, how are these songs going to fit together? There were albums that I loved to listen to all the way through, and I would have those tapes and I was happy with that. But then, yeah, there were just times where I just wanted to, I wanted to tape with A Tribe Called Quest and De Las Soul and Brand Nubian, like on the same tape. And that's how I felt most of the time, or Wu-Tang was putting out so many different artists that I wanted all the best from all the Wu-Tang artists on one tape. Now I was very much a mix tape person, but also exploiting the, BMG get 10, 12 CDs for a penny thing too.

Kate Jewell: 16:40

I definitely did that.

Austin McCoy: 16:42

Hip hop has a strong mixtape culture. Growing up in, in Ohio I wasn't necessarily exposed to the mix tape culture, right? I think you still had to live in New York City or Los Angeles or any sort of bigger city, or maybe even a more robust college town to get that. But I knew what mix tapes were and I knew that they existed. And I think, yeah, there is something with the relationship between hip hop and mixed tapes that I think encourages the selection of different songs and verses even in curating your own listening experience on a tape.

Kate Jewell: 17:20

I talked to Chris Deutsch for this podcast, and we talked about punk and precarity specifically was the theme of his mixtape. But in it, he said he really had to, as somebody with deep punk roots, think about the compilation. That the compilation is a very different thing than a mixtape in many ways because it comes out of a scene, it comes out of a label where you get a best of a particular time and place. Here's how Mark Masters in his book, High Bias, the Distorted History of the Cassette Tape explains what happens here. Cassettes were more important to a scene that grew out of punk in the late 1970s and early eighties: indie rock. Though the term came to mean many things over the ensuing decades, at first, it signified rock music that was made, released, and distributed independently of the corporate music industry. Many indie rock labels of this era released music both on LP and tape and eventually cd, but a significant subset preferred to go primarily or even exclusively with tapes. Key to these, Masters writes, were a few labels, especially that led by Bruce Pavitt Sub Pop, the label that grew out of his radio show and zine of the same name. As Masters explains a few issues into Subterranean Pop, pavitt decided to spread this art via cassette inspired by Australian Tape publication, Fast Forward, Pavitt made his fifth edition a cassette compilation rather than a print magazine aided by fellow chaos, DJ Calvin Johnson."Most compilations at that time were regional compilations with all hardcore bands from Boston or something like that," says Pavitt. What" I very consciously wanted to do was trans regional compilations so people in different scenes could hear what was going on in the other ones. I think the hip hop mix tape functioned a little differently than a compilation, but also differently from the way that I was making mix mixtapes from my dad's vinyl. That it was, it was like a marketplace.

Austin McCoy: 19:19

There are genres within the mix tape. So there's the compilation, right? There's the mix tape that I got from a friend, that was all of his gangster rap stuff, right? I was 12 years old, had no access to Cypress Hill, Ice Cube. I didn't have access to all these albums. I was one too young to buy all those albums. And then two, my parents probably weren't just going to buy them for me, so I begged one of my friends, to make a mixtape using his older brother's gangster rap stuff, right? So there is the compilation aspect of it. And then you can make a lot of mix tapes based upon mood, right? And of course, I think the mix tape that you would give to a crush like that spans genre, right? I don't think that's hiphop related. But that is one of the genres within the hip hop mix tape.

Kate Jewell: 20:21

When we talk about the genres of hip hop mix tapes, I think it's important to have a little bit of historical context to add to this conversation. Again, going back to Marc Masters, here's how he explains the evolution of the hip hop mix tape. He writes,"To keep up with the rapid fire changes happening with New York DJs" in the 1970s, you either had to make it to every jam or find some way to hear them after the fact. Enter the hip hop mix tape whose origin was somewhat accidental. Anthony Holloway, AKA Dj Hollywood performed his sets at discos recording them on eight track tapes so he could listen back later. It turned out he wasn't the only one who wanted to hear them. Though Hollywood's innovations got above ground attention, it was New York's hiphop underground that really ran with mix tapes, Masters writes, especially when cassettes took over from eight tracks and reel to reels. Fans started taping DJ sets with boom boxes and handheld recorders, either by holding them near speakers or if they had an in with the performers, hooking them to the venue's soundboard." As with Indie, these tapes began to circulate and they took on an important cultural role as well as helped artists to make a living. Masters explains mixed tapes were instant cultural currency in New York. But DJs wanted to turn them into actual cash. Sometimes meant simply making tapes at parties and selling them afterwards to fans who wanted to hear it all again or later to people who had missed out."But many DJs discovered a more lucrative market with a richer clientele who would pay almost anything to be part of the conversation, literally. These customers, sometimes drug dealers or hustlers, would pay DJs to shout out their names during sets, then buy a tape from them and blast it around town. It was a way to boast that not only did you have the hottest mix tapes, but you are also tight with the DJs themselves." As Masters concludes by the end of the 1970s, prominent DJs could make a living just from selling their mix tapes. So in other words, these tapes with themes that Austin and I are discussing here existed within these bigger conversations around their meaning and their value.

Austin McCoy: 22:29

I. It is like you can, grab all the, love songs that you might like and put them on. There's also artist specific mix tapes, right? And again, like Wu-Tang Clan, right? They, between 1993 and 1997, there were like 10, 12 albums that you can choose from to assemble a Wu-Tang mix tape. I think you could do the same thing with other artists like Ice Cube, right? But then they're thematic mix tapes, right? So you talk about Deutsche's mix tape around precarity. Yeah, you could do some political rap, right? Gangster rap, east Coast rap, Southern rap. You can do something that might be even more specific. So yeah, I think there are like genres within the hip hop mixtape that also makes the mixtape culture more dynamic or at least more what's the word I'm thinking of? Exceptional in some ways.

Kate Jewell: 23:23

Yeah, I have a lot of questions about that, but you're making me think about my high school boyfriend made me a mixed tape and uh, it had Ween on it, so I know what that says about love songs. I think it was the one where they're really high in ordering tacos was the Ween song

Austin McCoy: 24:33

I mean, There's, yeah, there's the mix tape that people are going to listen to when they get high, right? It's like you're gonna have loonie that got five on it and a bunch of Cypress Hill and, so it's yeah. That is, it's a vibe, right?

Kate Jewell: 24:46

I think it's interesting to observe how, just talking about the physical media, housing, our parents' music, the spaces we listened in, that that conversation sparked this larger reflection on the many meanings of our mix tapes, personal but also commercial. There's an emotional connection that we have to this art form, not just to the songs within them. Sure. We continue to make playlists for all different types of reasons, with themes and sub genres, and many different things that we're trying to communicate, but I think it's important to reflect on how these ways of expressing ourselves are shaped over time and how they reflect these relationships that were deeply important to us and allow some of these emotional connections to our loved ones to continue even after the physical media that conveyed the songs that they loved has maybe fallen somewhere into the back of your attic. So do share with me what your favorite theme of a mixtape is, whether it's on my substack or in a comment on wherever you get your podcasts, I would love to hear from you. I'm still very much a novice to this whole podcasting thing and editing and putting all of this together, and especially marketing. Uh, just the idea of putting this out there and then having to nurture it after it has left my microphone and gone out into the ether as a former radio dj is a very strange thing. So I appreciate anybody sharing an episode, sharing with me what you think and bearing with me, of course, as I am still figuring out all of the technical aspects of podcasting. So stay tuned for the continuation of my conversation with Austin McCoy as we delve deep into the back catalogs of his parents' music collection, and think about some of the bigger reflections that we can draw as music fans.