When Chance the Rapper wonders out loud if he’s the only one who still cares about mixtapes in the middle of his new release Coloring Book, it’s hard not to scratch your head a little: This is a mixtape? Sure, yes, it’s technically free; no, it isn’t affiliated with any major-label distribution system. But there is no shouting DJ. Every beat is original. Kanye West sings on the intro, and Justin Bieber makes a cameo near the end. The whole thing debuted with the backing of Apple, one of the largest companies in the world. Things got even weirder in June, when the Grammys announced that “streaming-only releases” will now be eligible for nominations. This means that, for the first time in history, something a rapper dubs a “mixtape” has a shot at winning a Grammy.
Once upon a time, mixtapes occupied much humbler territory. Like hand-taped show flyers and local in-store performances, they were the unofficial currency of rap’s bustling underground strivers’ market. In the late 1990s, mixtapes were more advertisements for the DJs who sequenced them than for the rappers who appeared on them, and they usually consisted of freestyles and preexisting verses from dozens of rappers stitched together in a free-ranging patchwork. The most successful and famous DJs found—to their dismay—that their material migrated to other cities via the clandestine taping of bootleggers. But for the most part, mixtapes were emphatically more local than national. A New York mixtape was purchased from a corner bodega in New York, and a Philly mixtape stayed in Philly.
Now, like nearly everything else in the music industry, mixtapes exist entirely online. They generate international audiences. They have official release dates. Rap fans talk about mixtapes “leaking” with a straight face, while sites like DatPiff hand out unofficial gold and platinum certifications based on download numbers. Musically, they are often indistinguishable from albums in almost every way that matters to listeners: Nine times out of 10, they are made up of entirely new material and there often isn’t a DJ present. These days, the only surefire way to know if a bundle of streaming files is a rapper’s “mixtape” is if they tell us so.
The winding path to this glorious confusion is long and was paved by many. DJ Drama, whose tapes with Lil Wayne, T.I., Jeezy, and others helped cement him as a titan of the form, remembers what the mixtape business was like before the internet took over. “In my early years, I was going to Kinko’s, copying things myself,” he says over the phone. “You had to find somebody who was able to press 10,000 CDs and then hand deliver them to your distributors. I spent the majority of my days going to all the flea markets and shops in Atlanta, every store that sold music to really get them out.”
Things started to change around 2003, when first adopters like Drama started taking advantage of a new access point. “You would wake up and go online to see the new G-Unit or Dipset tape out, and people would print up copies and get them to the various distributors from there,” he says. “For the first time, you didn’t have to go to New York or Philly.”
Another man with a deep understanding of how we got here isClinton Sparks. Alongside Drama and G-Unit’s DJ Whoo Kid, Sparks was one of the first DJs to treat the mixtape like a nascent album format. Like any hip-hop promoter, he is hard-charging and genially relentless in person: When I email him to ask if we can speak about his mixtape work, he responds by flying from Los Angeles to New York the very next day. “I’m a make-it-happen type of person,” he says.
Sitting in a dark, empty bar at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday, he explains how, in 2005, with assistance from two rappers lost in the crumbling major-label market and a couple of Philly MCs with little national presence, he made a mixtape series that still stands as one of the medium’s greatest achievements.
In the late ’90s, Sparks started out with his own dreams of being a solo rap star. But, as a white man from Boston in a time when New York “was the quintessential hip-hop mecca,” he hit a wall: “The automatic response was: ‘If you’re white, we don’t fuck with you. If you’re from Boston, we don’t fuck with you.’ You were automatically Vanilla Ice.” So he moved into radio, where he observed the patterns of glad-handing and favor-trading firsthand. He studied the promo-run patterns of labels sending artists on interview circuits and got gigs hosting radio shows as a DJ in Boston, Connecticut, New York, and Baltimore. Then he did one of the most crucial things a wannabe industry heavyweight can do: He lied about his importance.
“I knew how far behind the industry was on the internet, so I fooled everyone by saying I have a super-cracking radio show online, because I knew they would never look,” he says, laughing. “That’s how I got Eminem, Common, Kweli, Wu-Tang: Whenever artists did promo runs in Boston, I would have them come to my mom’s house, which was basically where I did my shows in Boston.”
Those radio shows offered him plenty of chances to collect material—freestyles from rappers, exclusives, performances—that he put into tapes. In 2004, Sparks cofounded the site MixUnit, an online hub for mixtapes that took a formula established by early sites like Tape Kingz and refined it, selling shirts, hats, and DVDs along with the cheaply burned CD-R mixtapes. “We weren’t the first to do it, but we did it bigger than everyone else,” says Sparks. He claims that MixUnit forced an early competitor to close down their own mixtape shop—and launch the now-booming video site WorldStarHipHop instead.
He also had some ambitious ideas about what a mixtape could be. “From the beginning, my mixtapes were always way different than everyone else’s,” he says. He would take verses recorded at his house and pair them with new beats, or remix songs altogether. “Me, DJ Green Lantern, and G-Unit simultaneously invented [the idea of] one artist rapping over a bunch of different beats. Prior to that it was just compilations,” says Sparks. “We would go to artists that were coming up and say, ‘Yo, why don’t we just do a whole mixtape?’ They’d be like, ‘I don't understand. What does that mean?’ So I'd say, ‘We’ll just fuckin’ jack all your favorite beats and only you will rap on them.’”
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