Music fans have been making mixtapes since the popularization of cassettes during the 1970s. As a kid, I often taped my favorite songs from the radio while a few years later I tried to woo more than a few sweeties with love song mixes (“Needs more Prince!”) designed to make them fall for me as well as appreciate my superior taste in music. While the concept of creating mixtapes wasn’t limited to genre, with heavy metal kids mixing tapes as much as the soul children, in the 1990s, hip-hop DJs turned personal pleasures into a commercial commodity that used the medium to promote new singles from established artist and introduce new artists in a completive environment as well as establish the DJ as a force.
Director David F. Mewa, whose short documentary Mixtape: An Unauthorized Biography makes its New York premiere at Urbanworld on Saturday (AMC Empire Theater 10pm), revisits that period in his love-letter to the form. “Me and my friends started making mixtapes as a form of empowerment,” 38-year-old Mewa says from his home in Toronto, Canada. “We were tired of listening to the radio and what they forced us to hear. Making mixtapes, we could be our own DJs. Later, I used made mixtapes professionally in the ‘90s, before film took over as my passion. But, when I started making music videos and docs, I knew that was a subject I wanted to explore.”
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