Sometime in the mid-1980s, my friend Scott sent me a tape with selections from Art of Noise and Grandmaster Flash, along with some Kinks, I think—mostly stuff unknown to me, but a good hour-or-so's slice of Scott's eclectic tastes. I had just bought a car with a tape deck, and that tape carried me from Kansas to South Carolina and rocked me up and down the Palmetto State until one day, as I crossed over the Cooper River outside Charleston, it went flzqtkscxwthlzzzz, wrapping its torn self around the capstan.
Partly to compensate, and largely unaware that thousands had been doing this already, I started making my own mix tapes. This was my introduction to the new-media culture of options—consumer choice, you make the call and all that—and eventually I plunged right in, got a CD changer and dubbing deck. And like a proud little boy, I started making series of mixes and sending them out to friends and family. And they sent theirs.
Consumer electronics has made this practice easier, but my problem has been finding burn-worthy songs. I've never warmed to file-exchanging, and I don't listen to commercial radio. It turns out others have trouble keeping up with decent music.
"In the past few years, I have been caught in a kind of music rut—I'm 39, live in a small town, spend much of my free time giving kids baths or attending little league games, not at clubs or house parties—and this sounded like a way to expand what I was listening to." A fellow named Dave told me this the other day, by e-mail, by way of explaining why he started a CD-exchange club. Each of 12 members picks a month and makes a compilation CD for the others.
I assumed that I rounded out a tight-knit twelvesome, but most of us do not know each other. Dave enlisted someone who enlisted me. And discs starting turning up, some with clever art and comments. Dave's seeding disc, Whiskey Mix, drenched in moonshine-tunes, remains among the best. Later arrived Death to Neo-con Jingo Nationalist Country, loaded with Neko Case, Drive-By Truckers and the like. Some took a rage-against tack. One collected unexpected song covers. And so on.
I do not identify these people for the obvious reason: Copyright law complicates compiling and disseminating music. Apple's iTunes only permits seven copies of purchased songs, a common complaint in our club's e-mail. Of course, most of us have bought new music as a result of the club, or have taken detours to catch concerts by musicians unknown to us a year ago.
And so I decided to toss together tunes by artists introduced to me by similar serendipity over the years, from barista recommendations to friends' mixes, from DJ Shadow to Tuxedomoon. Until I started preparing the cover art, a photo and the title backed by the playlist, I called this project Weird Shit. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was touring the frontiers of my tastes. Early chatter among clubbers disdained obscurity for obscurity's sake, and I agree in general with that. But as I've tried to keep up with pop music's evolving species, I find that the music I've loved has flourished in marginal lands. Last-minute playlist rejects were arguably too mainstream, like a selection from Ray Davies' latest. Instead, I favored artists such as Mus, the trippy Spanish duo, or the quirkily mannered Fiery Furnaces, or the British techno wizard Mr Scruff. Robyn Hitchcock ("Creeped Out") might have been safely just this side of the Davies line.
I mailed Cool Badge earlier this month. I took the title from Serge Gainsbourg's sassy critique of American consumerism, "Ford Mustang." As I said in my letter to the club, "millions in France would dispute his obscurity," but I've long enjoyed Gainsbourg's inventive, jazzy pop. I'm not sure what he meant by the term, but I think it applies to the honor of mixing with this anonymous band of connoisseurs.