The question that myself and Lex Luthor (Sub Bass Snarl), are probably most asked is "why don't you do mixtapes?". Mixtapes are so much an entrenched part of DJ culture, be it techno, house, hip hop, or whatever, that often the rationale behind their existence, and their politics, are ignored.

Audio tapes have a chequered history; easy-to-record, cheap, and able to be done in the comfort of your own home, cassettes have always figured prominently in post-1970s underground music cultures from DIY punk to what exists now in dance music and DJ culture. In countries where CD manufacturing plants and digital studios are non-existent, audio cassettes remain the primary means of music distribution and essential to local music industries. Recent years however have seen millions of dollars from the major record companies being put into developing a successor (DAT, DCC, MiniDisc) - one which will offer better sound reproduction, and, more importantly, better copyright control by supposedly eliminating chain copying.

Mixtapes are an artefact of our advanced (?) capitalist consumer society, and as such they both reflect as well as challenge mainstream ideologies. The politics of the mixtape can be subdivided two ways; first from the position of the DJ; and second, from the position of the listener. This is further complicated by the recent introduction of mix CDs which have very different politics that I will discuss later. For the DJ the mixtape serves a number of purposes. Most obviously it is a showcasing of talents mixing techniques, track selections, and in the main the mixtape is similar to a resume, something you give a prospective employer (the infamous promoter). Then the mixtape is also an original composition, albeit a highly controversial postmodern composition which necessitates the infringement of archaic and draconian copyright laws, however with its author, the DJ, clearly inscribed upon the sleeve, the final product is much like a rock band's album or maybe demo tape. Generated and reproduced at minimal cost, the mixtape becomes a reasonably profitable source of income both directly and in work that it brings in. Certainly in Sydney the biggest earners from mixtapes are the record shops most of whom pay DJs flat rates (around $15 each, sometimes less) and then sell them at prices as high as $30 for a single cassette. For the listener or mixtape consumer the uses of a mixtape are slightly harder to determine. Some people buy mixtapes because they like a particular DJ's style and want to own a "slice of their character", others choose their tapes to replicate a specific club/rave experience that a certain DJ has helped create. Then more buy them simply to get the latest music of a particular style, knowing that the majority of tunes on the tape will be unreleased, rare, or a combination of the two.

Popular music has reached a stage where, through the development of recording technology, consumption (the act of listening) is often far removed from its production (the act of performance). French critic, Jacques Attali, goes to considerable effort to argue that the processes of recording, first by monks in the Middle Ages through the development of notation, and now through major label record companies, has turned music from a celebratory experience, into what is now an isolated and alienated listening experience where the listener is turned into a commodity-driven consumer. Attali is talking, in the main, about European classical music, but his ideas apply equally well to dance music culture. In challenging ideas of copyright and ownership, mixtapes, it can be argued, have the potential to bypass the mainstream capitalist dialogues of the music industry creating other "underground" global flows of music. A good example of this is the DIY punk tape culture of the mid-1980s, and on a larger scale, the global distribution of small-scale independent techno labels from Detroit to Berlin, Berlin to London, London to Sydney, Sydney to Tokyo and back. But mixtapes also reflect the desire within capitalist society to generate "objects" for sale and purchase. Not only this but they also help turn the DJ, once an incidental performer in a dance party full of performers (the crowd), into a deity by providing a static fetish object much like an oracle - "worship and study the oracle well enough and you too can become a deity" or so the saying goes.

One of my earliest experiences as a non-radio DJ, and possibly one of the first Sub Bass Snarl gigs was at a punk benefit at Newtown Neighbourhood Centre back in 1991. From that point on it became increasingly clear that DJing was a form of music production attained through the recycling of "other people's music". Music that was trapped in its form as a commodity item, was suddenly, via the DJ, transformed into a "live" folk music - liberated and given back to the people. The listener was essential in the process of performing, responding to and feeding back into the track selection and mixing style. In other words there was no divide between listener and performer for without the participation of one the other would not exist. Enter the rave, the free parties in Sydney Park, the events in abandoned warehouses - momentary instances of spontaneous community "vibes". The music was the drawcard but without the creation of a "vibe", or a feeling of community, each event would have failed miserably. Compare the vibrant origins of hip hop on street corner parties in the Bronx . . . . commodities being subverted from their ortiginal uses and being returned back to the community . . . .and the way the slowed beats of the current corporate hip hop regime now confine recorded hip hop to the isolation of the loungeroom and the bong.

Whether DJ mixtapes feed a consumer fetish to buy back memories (think of the Field Of Dreams 4 video tapes), or a capitalist need to desire and worship the cult of the star (where it is intended that we all believe that with enough practise we, too, can be stars), the recent advent of the mix CD is perhaps the final nail in the coffin of removing the experience of listening from the experience of performing.

Look along the shelves of your local record store. Who makes and markets the vast majority of DJ mix CDs? The major labels - Sony, EMI, Warners, BMG - or their offshoots, and the Americans. Rave culture (or whatever we call it now) has only in the last two years really hit America - the last bastion of rock'n'roll where dance music was relegated in the well-planned marketing strategies of the major labels to a target market of, and I quote a record executive, "niggers and faggots". Reared on a diet of image-based consumerism coupled with almost total major label corporate colonisation of music distribution and production (where else but New York would you get arrested on a street corner for selling mix tapes?), the mix CD has become the primary choice for consumers wishing to reproduce the dance party experience in their loungeroom where they need not deal with "other people". And not all mix CDs are marketed as mix CDs.

Nine out of ten American techno (or whatever the hippest thing is now - West Coast white-boy "trip hop"), compilations are now mixed by some DJ or other, whilst only about one out of every ten English or European compilations of similar styled music are mixed. America has always been slow to take up rave culture, and its society of "pre-packaged experiences" seems to have put a particular slant on the way rave culture is sold over there now. Pre-packaged nights out at a club or dancing in a field can now be comfortably "simulated" in your very own loungeroom and there is no need to have the "hassle" of mixing with other people. Baudrillard's hyperreal nightmare where the image or simulation at last renders the "real" unnecessary . . . This "pre-packaging" (the mix compilation) has the added effect of making dance music "comfortable" (read as "commercially viable") and turning it into another loungroom commodity like Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, and whoever else.

For Sub Bass Snarl, music is a means to an end, that end being the bringing together of people. No "vibe" can be created from a mixtape, especially when it ends up being jammed into someone's Walkman or car stereo. The creation of a mixtape, too, is more often than not a process of solitude - locking oneself in a bedroom with a pair of turntables for hours of painful record-rewind-record. Bringing people together means liberating music from the stockpile of mix tapes, mix CDs and the like in your car or loungeroom and getting you along to some event or another where you and the music can be united with other people.

Yellow Peril

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