A funny, engaging memoir of music and nostalgia
At one point in Our Mixtapes, Ourselves: The Happy-Sad Story and Soundtrack of Generation X, David Grady writes that mixtapes in the 1980s were “the perfect mechanism for saying everything you couldn’t say yourself.” He lists examples: “the ‘sad breakup’ tape, the ‘angry breakup’ tape, the ‘I think you’re cool and want you to think I am, too’ tape.”
Grady’s musical memoir is structured around groups of songs, tracing a chronology through Grady’s memories and personal history: the classic rock of the 1970s and several iterations of new wave, punk, and post-punk across the eighties and nineties. If the book is a sprawling mixtape, what is the message represented by this mechanism?
Grady approaches his memories of the history and evolution of new wave with great fidelity (high fidelity?) and attention to detail. He invites the reader into a tribute to the experience of music as something physical, geographical, and communal. Even more so than to the music itself, the book is a love letter to Boston and to Grady’s own musical community. He approaches the story of his developing relationship with these songs with the same care and delicacy that he describes putting into “emergency mixtape surgery” in the 1980s.
The question that emerges ultimately is one of our relationship to nostalgia. Grady asks at one point, “Is nostalgia a warm, comfortable blanket that offers us shelter from a hostile and overwhelming world? Or is it the cold kitchen floor we slipped on while dancing to ‘The Safety Dance’?” The nostalgia Grady characterizes in Our Mixtapes, Ourselves never feels quite so hostile as a cold floor. At times there is something bracing about it, and it does evoke pain and loss, particularly as the narrator attempts to navigate a future without some of the people who were integral to his relationship to music: a close lifelong friend as well as Grady’s older brother, who introduced him to so much of this world. Grady writes that “in the new wave-saturated 1980s, new album releases were like postcards from the future;“ this version of the future feels exciting and fantastical, but there are other times throughout the memoir when the future feels more weighted and troubled. Now that some of the future has arrived, what can be found in revisiting those albums, which now feel like capsules of the past?
Moving chronologically through the past, but always with one eye on the present, Grady maneuvers with humor, feeling, and self-awareness. He situates his examination of music within broader contexts, including developing technologies, misogyny in 1980s music, circles and the AIDS crisis. Our Mixtapes, Ourselves is a work of love on behalf of Generation X and a lived-in compendium of songs, which Grady aptly compares to heirlooms: “musical artifacts that bring generations together, like campfire stories told to a backbeat of drum machines and synthesizers.”
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