On Music and Sharing, But Not Piracy

I've never really thought of the mixtape as a public space before because I've always thought of my mixes as very personal but this mix that I made over the weekend has been getting a lot of play around my house. I'm very ambivilant towards it because, what I wanted to call obvious, Brandon corrected me with the word public. While I thought I was being very obvious with this mix in capturing my time spent in college radio, i realize it's not obvious as much as it is public. There's a way this mix doesn't feel like my mix because it's not. It's music I've shared with people already.

This idea relates to something else I've been thinking about: the use of the Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich song in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Because hearing it in the movie, made me kinda sad that he took that experience of finding it on my own away from me. But I realized that I may not have liked it the same if I had not been exposed to it in the way I was. What I really didn't like about the song being in the movie, was not being able to share it with other people in the way of exposure. Like a mixtape shares something personal with someone else. The public space of the movie theater or how the song re-enters the collective consciousness as "the song from that Tarantino movie" (See also Miserlou, and Stuck in the Middle With You) levels the power dynamic in exposing someone to new music. If you've seen the movie, the song starts out as ours, not mine or yours.

In Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics he states that publics are arranged around a text. In this way my mix CD isn't really my mix CD, but somehow I still have a power/knowledge. So does Tarantino, his is very literal. Like making a mix, there's a power in knowing, and Tarantino uses the narrative in Death Proof to show he knows a song you don't, that it's good, and that you're going to like it.

And isn't that the purpose of a mixtape?