The Mixtape Is Dead, Long Live The Mixtape

I remember coming to New York for a vacation in 2004 as a 15-year-old, excited to soak up as much hip hop culture as possible right there at the cradle. I went around town looking for rare releases – music from artists that no one had ever heard about back in my German hometown. Hitting up the spots that had come to my ear as the prime locations for picking up the latest rap mixtapes, or even just randomly running into people in the streets who were trying to sell their music, I quickly fell into the white-kid-with-a-baseball-hat-trap. “Do you like hip hop?” Why, of course I do.

By the end of the trip, I had spent virtually all my vacation money on burned CDs with pixelated covers from the photo-copier, finding out about dudes like Grafh and Stack Bundles in the process. I even returned with a story of how I had actually met one of the rappers from D-Block. (Jae-Hood might have made for a better story, but Trav was certainly enough to raise my street cred a notch.)

So as I embarked on a new mixtape quest last month, I expected to find at least a fair amount of tape-wielders still out there on their grind – even with releases these days never more than a datpiff-login away. But I didn’t. Canal Street, Union Square, Fulton Street and 125th Street were bustling as ever, but the mixtape-peddling had shrunk to a minimum.

There were a few tables stacked with soul, gospel and early rhythm and blues selections, curated by some old heads who may or may not have been radio DJs back in the day. And there was Abdul, a kind-hearted, easy-going fella with a handheld-amp-and-mic-setup, who said he was currently in the process of working on some R&B songs to record for a demo.

“I just do it for the love,” came the answer when I asked why he’s still out there. He gave me a little reverb-heavy demonstration of some of his tunes, causing a few smiles and bobbing heads from passers-by. Abdul also had a handful of DJ mixtapes with him, but he said the market for those had dried up. “Some people just brought bad vibes out here. They got all into people’s faces and were being really aggressive selling their tapes. That kind of ruined it for everyone.”

Oversaturation kicked in around the mid-’00s, when virtually every NY mixtape rapper was marketed as the next big hype by the industry. Digitilisation and a disorienting array of lawsuits and federale crackdowns played their own part in the demise of hand-to-hand distribution right around that same time.

In 2004, New York City also lost their prime DIY-distribution pioneer to the West Coast. A legend for selling his tapes in front of the Fat Beats record store for more than a decade, Percee P was the face of guerilla rap artistry back when it was thriving. Being from an era where personal interaction, word-of-mouth propaganda and owning physical copies of music had no substitute, Percee still sticks to his game to this day. “Every tape is a new person spreading my name around, keeping my name alive. To me it’s worth something. The reward is to have people talking about how they met me in person.”

When Percee left his hometown to connect with the Stones Throw family (and later record his first solo LP in more than 20 years with Madlib), he had already seen the winds starting to turn in New York. “I started seeing the scene changing,” Boogie Down’s Finest remembers. “I’m not trying to say New York ain’t keeping it real or nothing, but the masses are following the glamour. They’re not supporting the roots as much as people on the West Coast.”

New York’s dog-eat-dog mentality had swallowed its own tail. Independent record labels and stores closed, unable to keep up with the market demands of the omnivorous major machine. Disillusion set in as the mixtape rap bubble burst and the rest of the world got access to all the NY underground they could handle, by way of digital formats.

If you make your way out to Los Angeles, you still might catch a piece of New York City mixtape culture in the form of Percee P selling his CDs at an underground rap show. Percee’s not gonna let the changing conditions knock his hustle. “It’s part of who I am as a person.” And back in his hometown, a handful of folks like Abdul are also still holding it down. Selling mixtapes may not be what the internet generation gravitates towards, but it’s part of the foundation, and will be around in some form or another as long as the founding fathers are.

“Some people say I’m like a dinosaur,” Percee says with a laugh. “But I wear it proudly.” With a little luck, you might just stumble across one of these dinosaurs on the streets of New York City. Chances are, though, your vacation money is gonna last longer than it used to.