WHO IS ON YOUR MIXTAPE?

Already the topic title is showing my age, and for some of my readers I’m going to need to explain what a “mixtape” actually is, so let me get that out of the way.  Back before everything was streaming, physical media was the only real way to enjoy electronic entertainment, outside of just plain old listening to the radio (which, oh man, doesn’t THAT sound ancient).  In the CD era, it was common for someone to have a large library of music from CDs from various artists and, before engaging on a long road trip, or as a gift to someone with a mutual interest, or simply “just because”, they’d create a “mixtape” (yes, tape would refer to the era of cassettes, but just stick with me here) of various songs from various artists.  Sometimes, these would be themed (a “Valentine’s” mixtape of love songs, or a “Hardcore Metal” mixtape of various hard hitters), and sometimes it would just be absolute madness of stuff mixed up, but the end was the same: different songs from different artists all on one CD.  Heck, you can even buy these NOW, ready made for you at your local Walmart, typically in the form of “Now That’s What I Call Music Volume Infinity”. But what was interesting about these mixtapes was more about what they revealed about the CREATOR of the tape.  Specially, what sort of musical interest they held, what artists they had been exposed to, and, quite simply, what they considered to be “good music”.  So tell me, dear reader: who is on YOUR mixtape?

Like this, but for music...and yes, I DID had this demo disc

 

This whole idea came to me in the shower this morning, as most good thoughts do, as I was recovering from my current workout of Dan John’s “Easy Strength” AND “Mass Made Simple” mashed together (which I intend to flesh out more fully in the future, as it’s just plain awesome).  I started thinking how fortunate it was that I stumbled across Dan John, and it was because I was so fortunate to start reading about training from a martial arts background rather than a meathead/bodybuilding one, which meant I got turned on the Pavel Tsastouline right from the get-go alongside Super Squats (both recommended to me by the same dude, which I owe a LOT for having done so), which got me pointed in the direction of Ironmind, which got me pointed at Paul Kelso and John McCallum while at the same time also got me heading to T-Nation, which got me pointed at Dan John’s book “Never Let Go”, which I DIDN’T let go of from start to finish (reading it on a cruise on an old school kindle when I should have been…enjoying the cruise).  And somewhere along the line I got pointed in the direction of the delightful lunatic of Jamie Lewis, of which I’ve written extensively of his benefit to my overall life, and how interestingly that matched up with Dan John’s high praise of “the Velocity Diet”, and how through T-nation I discovered Date Tate, which got me to Elitefts, which totally colored how I approached training and nutrition in my 20s, which got me pointed to Jim Wendler for 5/3/1 AND Mark Bell for “Power Magazine”, through which I RE-discovered Jon Andersen (“that jacked dude that competed in IFSA?  Hell yeah!), and there’s still SO much more in there I’m missing (Stuart McRobert, we love you!...some of the time!)   Man, what a wild journey: thanks for engaging me there.

 

But check out MY mixtape up there: what an eclectic collection of interesting lunatics.  But that’s also the key point there: almost all of those folks I listed are INTERESTING.  Many were trained WRITERS rather than lifters (Paul Kelso, Dan John, John McCallum and yes, even Jim Wendler’s degree was in English literature and Jamie Lewis’ academic background was on history), and those that weren’t trained authors were, legit, just absolutely insane (Jon Andersen was functionally illiterate and Mark Bell/Dave Tate BOTH overcome learning disabilities).  I was simply never drawn to those authors that were more academic, researched and scientific than they were talented storytellers.  I suppose it boiled down to, if I was going to spend time reading, I wanted to be entertained, since this was my “free time”.  But, as a result: isn’t my OWN training and nutrition pretty entertaining?  This is, of course, self-validating: I’m asking an audience of people that came here to READ me if I’m entertaining…but the sheer fact this blog has ANY sort of following means at least SOMEONE finds me entertaining (and hey, I’m in YOUR mixtape: inception!).

Really going the the early 2000s stuff today it seems

But SOME of you dudes out there are only listening to the top 40s!  Some of you dudes out there are PURE “bubblegum pop”, only listening to what’s popular, mainly because that’s “safe”.  You’re so afraid of having an actual opinion or feeling about the music that you let “the industry” tell you what to like and what not to like.  Alternatively, some of you stopped listening to new music once high school ended, and you’re that dude that just had to keep changing their radio station from “pop” to “modern” to “retro” to “classic” to “oldies”, trying DESPERATELY to hunt down SOMEONE who will play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” over the airwaves for you! (Sirius XM has you covered by the way).  Some of you have a mixed tape of 1-hit wonders: dudes that were right ONE TIME and could never recapture that magic, and you just keep going back to that well to relive that one moment even though their time is GONE. 

 

Flat out: I don’t wanna go on a road trip with some of you dudes, because your mixtape is BORING.  It’s awful.  It’s all stuff I’ve heard before.  Where are the DEEP TRACKS?  Where’s the stuff I haven’t heard before?  Where is the new, undiscovered artist?  Where are those artists who take risks?  Who try something new, different, that hasn’t been heard before?  Play THAT music for me.  Force me out of my comfort zone and let me see if I care for it.  And FORCE me to sit down and REALLY listen.  Did this artist achieve their goal of making ART, or did they achieve their REAL goal of making money?  Hell, I like ACDC, but what I really like about them is that after I bought one of their CDs I effectively owned their whole collection.  Meanwhile, Trent Reznor can release a CD where he sounds like a different artist THROUGH the CD, and for some of you cats he’s too “mainstream”.  And meanwhile, no matter how much I try to like Amon Aramath, since “Viking” and “metal” sound like they’d be great together, I can’t get over how much the lead singer sounds like Cookie Monster….but at least I listened to a LOT of their music before I came to that conclusion.

At least these guys knew they were a parody

A common phrase is “you are an average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”, and there’s a lot of value in that phrase, but it, of course, extends beyond just your friends and co-workers.  Your training and nutrition is going to be an average of the 5 individuals whose media you consume.  I had to re-write that line a few times, because I originally wrote “authors” until I realized that SO many of you dudes AREN’T F**KING READING!  …of course, I’m saying that ON my written blog, so most likely you AREN’T the machine I should be raging against (music pun: hah!) but ya’ll get my point: some folks ONLY consume social media for their information source on how to achieve physical transformation.  Folks: I read entertaining authors, but I was READING AUTHORS: it was 200-300 pages of information.  No matter how entertaining you try to be, over the course of 200-300 pages, you EVENTUALLY say something valuable (although I still think “The Sun Also Rises” was awful…).  But social media stars?  They pride themselves on stretching out how long they can get you to watch their videos and do so by padding the hell out of them with garbage and click bait so you hang out JUST long enough to hit whatever metric they need to hit to cash in.  And it costs them NOTHING to throw up a video, whereas a published author had to go through the rigors of actually having their work reviewed by SOMEONE ELSE that saw fit to publish it (not counting e-book trash directly flooded onto the market…as someone that release a free e-book with no publisher whatsoever).  Yes yes, if you wanna take this music metaphor further you could very well claim these are “undiscovered artists” and that publishers are just “the industry” dictating what is and is not popular: if you’re intelligent enough to be able to figure that out, maybe you can sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to these internet fellows.

 

But either way, take a step back and look at how is on YOUR mixtape.  Is it a mixtape you’d be ok sharing with someone else?  Or is your musical taste…a little embarrassing?  Would you throw your mixtape into the CD player on the roadtrip and let 3 other people jam to it?  If someone wanted a changeup, would you say “give THIS a listen!”?  If not: why not go pick up some new tunes somewhere and see where they take you?  Head down to Sam Goody (points if you know what THAT is), pick up a bunch of CDs from dudes you’ve never heard of before, given them a listen and see what jumps out.  Even if nothing grabs you right away, occasionally, and ear worm works its way in and you eventually think “hey, that was actually pretty good: I wonder what else they released?”