“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”
- Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

It's better not to take advice from someone like Rob Gordon. But for mixtapes, we'll make an exception. The mixtape has a long and winded history, and it has fulfilled many functions over the decades. It could be a love (or a break up) letter, a political statement, or simply a concentrated effort to make a good party a great party. It can also simply be an expression of how you feel at a given time.

In eiter case, the mixtape is in this sense a pure for of curation. When done badly, it takes a work of art out of its context, making it estrange its listeners. But when done right, it takes something that the artist might not have consciously embedded into his work, and it places it together with other works that share that characteristic, to create something new that makes you realize that it fits, that makes you think
"this sounds so good."