On facebook lately you’ve probably heard me talking about my Best of
2012 Volume 3 mix. Those of you who’ve known me for a while know what it’s all about
but for those of you who don’t, I’d like to let you know what they are and why
I make these mixes… the whole story.
So what's the deal with these mixtapes? I've been making
mixtapes since the late 80's. Back then, I used to listen to the radio and
record the songs I liked. As a pre-teen and teen, they weren’t exactly cutting
edge mixes but they made me happy. As a poor kid from the inner city, it was
like I had the songs I liked without having to go buy them. Sure sometimes the
beginnings or endings or both were chopped off, but at the time, it was enough.
Then in the 90’s it became recordings from cassettes and dubs of tapes I'd pick
up. I remember when the Galleria opened back in the early 90's driving around
the parking lots in my friend’s car and rocking out my rap mixtapes. My friend
couldn't afford a booming system but he was an electrician's assistant so he
figured out a way to rig a huge old house speaker in the back trunk of his car.
So we'd drive around the parking lots setting off car alarms and making
everybody look. The bass was crazy. Sometimes, depending on the song, your
teeth could rattle! The best part for me was that we were using my mixtapes. You'll
have to pardon the analogy but he brought out the big gun and I supplied the
ammo. We drove back and forth pumping LL, Tribe Called Quest, Eric B &
Rakim, Kid n Play, the DOC, Gangstarr, De La, Common Sense, EPMD, Big Daddy
Kane, P.E. and whatever else I could find to put in the mix. It was usually the
best stuff out at that time.
I grew up on radio and MTV and not always in that order. I
listened to what they played because how else were you going to get music back
then? We didn’t have our own PCs in the early 90’s. We’d sit on our porches
playing WBLK or WKSE (I’m ashamed to admit) and kick it in the neighborhood.
Music provided the soundtrack for my life but the worst was when something wonderful
happened on or near the porch but an awful song was on the radio at the time.
Then I’d associate that great memory with Hangin’ Tough by the New Kids on the
Block. Or I’d remember a certain kiss with a certain female to Milli Vanilli’s
Girl You Know it’s True. I’m not going to front, I loved those songs back in
the day but it’s also a little embarrassing to my ego now in a funny way when I
think of it. I guess I wanted more control over these moments. So then at
parties, little get-togethers, hanging out on the porch and the like I made
mixtapes that offered only the best songs. Sure the songs were my favorites
among relatively popular stuff, but there are no cheesy DJs, commercials and
you didn’t have to sit through Anita Baker to get to Bobby Brown (no offense
Anita). By the mid-90’s my tastes branched out into new areas. I started to
enjoy alternative rock and grunge while my previous tastes had evolved. Instead
of liking the hip hop on Yo! MTV Raps, I learned that there was a ton of great
hip hop that didn’t get airplay on MTV or WBLK for that matter. I learned this
through listening to a little college radio station on Sunday nights called
WBNY.
When I went to Buffalo
State in the fall of 1996
I was eager to get involved with some student organizations. First I tried the
college paper, The Record. Fortunately, the staff at The Record were total
dicks to my friend and I so we decided to check out the radio station instead.
Almost from the moment we walked into WBNY we felt wanted and part of the crew.
And what a crew it was! There were people of differing ages, cultures, tastes
and more and I absorbed as much as I could. 6 months later my mixtapes became a
lot more diverse. Every week I was digging to new depths and discovering new
bands, old bands, old genres, new sub-genres. It was awesome. I started making
funk mixtapes, trip hop mixtapes, alt-country, British pop, you name it. As my
confidence in my taste grew in the late 90’s I was making mixtapes for people
other than myself. It takes a lot to go to other “music” people and say; “hey
listen to this, it’s really good” and put your reputation on the line but I was
beginning to be so bold.
Part of what happens as you dig deeper and deeper into the
music that is out there beyond the scope of popular radio and television is you
start to wonder how some of the stuff that becomes popular is popular and why
some of the amazing stuff you’ve found is not. It probably has something to do
with how 47% of Americans voted for Mitt Romney and why Kid Rock has had a
great 10 year run. Yes, I’m talking about becoming a bit of a music snob. It
was worse when I was active at WBNY where I had great disdain for almost
anything popular. As I’ve aged and moved away from my WBNY days (which ended 10
years ago) I’ve softened a bit but you’ll never catch me listening to the radio
if I have a choice. I just don’t think most of the songs and any of the stations
are very good. Truth is, it's hard to not become a bit bitter or jaded with the
record industry when you are voluntarily submerged in the underground. You hear
the things that are most popular and they begin to sound the same or at the
very least derivative of the first awful song that set the chain in motion. It’s
the way the music business has always been. They have to find the next Elvis,
the next Beatles, the next Beach Boys, Bowie, Michael Jackson, Van Halen, Madonna,
Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Jay Z, Rihanna and so on. In the music industry,
if 1 is good then 100 is better. It’s why these fads come and go and when they
go, they go not because something better has come along, but because the fad
was done to death and we just can’t stand it anymore. In more experimental
times, like the 60’s and 70’s these fads mostly faded away and we moved on. It
wasn’t until the late 70’s and into the 80’s when a fad overstayed it’s
welcome, was exploited in every conceivable manner and caused such a major
uproar it HAD to end. If you remember, people began to hate disco with a
passion. That’s the first one I can think of. There were Anti-disco nights and
the Bee Gees went from the biggest stars in the world to persona non grata and
had to “disappear” from public view for a while because of it. This is also
around the time that radio began to change from the experimental, unpredictable
catalyst it was into more of the refined, streamlined crap it is today. People
started using terms like “markets”, “demographics” and “radio consultants” and
before you knew it we had soft rock stations, hard rock stations, or today’s
crappy mixed format stations like Jack or Crap FM. It used to be that a DJ
could throw on a record and if they felt like flipping it over and playing the
B-side, they could. Some of the great hits of all time were originally B-sides because
a DJ flipped it over and found gold. Examples of B-sides: The Beatles-
Something, Day Tripper, Revolution, Eleanor Rigby. The Beach Boys- Don’t Worry
Baby, Little Deuce Coupe, God Only Knows. The Rolling Stones- Let’s Spend the
Night Together, Lady Jane. The Smiths- How Soon is Now. XTC- Dear God. Gloria
Gaynor- I Will Survive. I think you get the point.
Nowadays playlists are pretty strict because of testing and research.
“They” know what people like. How about turning on people to new and
interesting stuff? Radio has failed us but much like other aspects of our
society, it wasn’t radio that did it, nor did video kill the radio star, at
least not completely. It was money. When people value money over art and cannot
find the happy medium between the two what you get is today’s hit music
stations. If I’m in someone’s car and they have one of them on I’m astonished
by both how bad the music is and how much the songs sound the same. To me it
seems nearly all of today’s hits have a similar beat and everyone is singing
like a robot these days or through a vocoder of some kind. I think most popular
music is unfortunate and lazy. I’m not hatin' on anybody either. I hope all of
these “artists” go out and make that money. I don’t blame them for cashing in,
I just think they suck. They won’t get any of mine. So yeah, I still have some
of the music snob inside of me. I suspect I always will. You simply can’t have
heard and seen the things I did and then go back to giggling on request lines. That’s
why I make mixtapes. Even though I’m 10 years out of my full time college radio
shows I still want to rebel against the system. I still want to turn people on
to stuff they may not have heard of. I no longer do it on the air, I do it
through the mix.
Something I used to do back in my college radio days was
find "the singles". I'd always look for the catchiest songs on the
record. It’s that happy medium I was talking about between money and art.
Perhaps it’s my background growing up on hit radio but I try to find great
songs that in a more musically liberated and awesome society would be hits. Sure
I could be impressed with a bombastic 12 minute opus that takes you for a
serious ride, but I've always been drawn to the 3 and 4 minute numbers that
really cook. Back at WBNY it was our job a lot of times to listen to records
and then pick out the 3 or 4 best songs and write a review with recommended
tracks so the other DJs would know what tracks to focus on if they didn’t know
the band and didn’t want to experiment too much. My mixes are full of
“recommended tracks”. Also because I'm not a typical male, you don't get a CD
full of 20+ songs by male artists or bands. You get variety even though I keep
the format to college radio styled indie rock and pop.
There’s no accounting for taste but what do I look for? When
it comes to a song I look for powerful and/or fun and definitely catchy. The
catchy part is most important to me. I look for songs with mass appeal ignored
by the masses. And when one of "my songs" ends up in a car commercial
or breaking through in some way, it's bittersweet. The hypocritical music snob
inside of me is saddened that now people who somehow don't deserve to enjoy
such a cool song will now pretend to while the sweet music lover inside is
happy the band is getting the recognition they deserve and hopes they will
become huge like they probably deserve to be. I think deep down, I’m proud that
more people got turned onto the song/band. That’s the pretty part of this
process with the snob being the ugly part. I think the balance between the two
makes for great taste but again, there’s no accounting for taste and I digress.
It’s a never ending and painstaking process to make these
Best of the year CDs but so is keeping up with good music. I don’t spend nearly
the time I used to listening to everything I can but I’m involved enough to
keep putting out these CDs. The Best of 2012 volume 3 will be coming out on
Friday. I will be giving them to people for free that night and the days and
nights ahead until I run out. Perhaps people will hear the songs and then go
out and buy some of the CDs by bands and artists in my mix. Maybe one day
someone will hear one of my mixes and decide to make their own. That’s the only
way this rebellion keeps going. Viva la resistance!
Lastly, here’s a list of all the mixtapes I’ve made post-WBNY
days. I still use my last/current radio name “Crazy Eddie” when I release them
so they are usually titled “Crazy Eddie presents”
My mixtapes:
-The Best of 2004
-The Best of 2005
-The Best of 2006
-The Best of 2007
-The Best of 2008
-The Best of 2009
-The Best of 2010, Volume 1- released 5/10
-The Best of 2010, Volume 2- released 12/10
-The Best of 2011, Volume 1- released 6/11
-The Best of 2011, Volume 2- released 12/11
-The Best of 2012, Volume 1- released 4/12
-The Best of 2012, Volume 2- released 8/12
-The Best of 2012, Volume 3- release on 12/14/12
-Happy Holidays from Crazy Eddie, now in it’s 3rd
edition
-The Soul of Crazy Eddie (2 CD set)
-Best of Latin Freestyle
-Halloween, now in it’s 2nd edition
-80’s Movie Mix
-Summersongs
The “Flashback Annuals” series: (a “what-if” series of
mixtapes that I might have made in past years if I could go back in time)
-The Best of 1977
-The Best of 1980
-The Best of 1981
-The Best of 1982
-The Best of 1983
-The Best of 1984
-The Best of 1985
-The Best of 1986
-The Best of 1987
-The Best of 1988
-The Best of 1989
