Play That Funky Music White Girl

At 10 years old I wanted to be white. I didn't want my nappy hair, or my broad nose, or my full lips. I didn't want my chestnut eyes, let alone my dark brown skin. I couldn't readily change any of those so I changed what I could. I started talking differently, I subbed out Jamaican patois for something generically "American." I shunned reggae and dancehall for soft rock or whatever came out of American Idol. I hated when my stepmother prepared ackee and saltfish with fried breadfruit, I just wanted Fruit Loops for breakfast. I used the name Keith online. At 10 years old I was already bombarded with American media. Beautiful was straight, shoulder length hair. Smart had blue-green eyes. Eloquent was thin, pursed lips. Cool was always pale, white skin. I don't know how common this experience was worldwide but I'm sure most of the globe is fluent in a "for export only" Americana due to US cultural imperialism.

I wouldn't realise what were shown on the television and in the cinemas were more specific than just "white" for years. The classic coming of age stories, produced in and sold by Hollywood, depicted a manicured, idealised, and specific teenagerdom where even whiteness was depicted in narrow bands. Accents were homogenised and high school caste systems were codified along lines of interest and activities. These suburban backlots for nostalgic dreams embellished a privileged adolescence. All that said, it also had a clear appeal — a desire to return (or to arrive for the first time) to a simpler time. Structured days that gave way to chaotic weekends and lazy summers. Closer friends in both proximity and relations, and a lot more time to do whatever or to figure things out. In reality the pressures of adulthood and the evils of the world have no respect for suburban zoning much less ones status as a minor, but in the coming-age-film, teenagers are typically eased into adulthood.

The teen comedy is a permutation of the coming-of-age film that adds its own layer of strange world logic. Here pain is temporary and everything is funny. Anything tragic is off camera; there's no overdosing, no police shootings, no debilitating injury from belly flopping into a kiddie pool from the third floor. The teen comedy revels in the perceived invulnerability of youth. In other words, kids do dumb shit because they don't know better and the teen comedy imagines a world where the decisions made get more ridiculous but the consequences are less severe.

Mixtape (2026) is a direct adaptation of most, if not all, of the tropes of the Hollywood teen comedy/coming-of-age film. It was developed by Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur and is set in a fictional Californian town. The player, for most of the game's runtime, is anchored to Stacey Rockford, a recent high school graduate planning her last 24 hours in her sleepy home town before she heads to New York. The thing to know about Stacey is that her "mixtapes are magic." She dreams of becoming a music supervisor, think picking out the music for theme parks, films, advertisements etc., and through some off-screen sleuthing finds out where an higher-up in a company she rates frequents. Her plan is to ambush said higher-up at a Starbucks or something, hand her the mixtape, and wow her into getting a job. No one questions the feasibility of this plan, because, again, her "mixtapes are magic."

So for this last day, flanked by her two best friends Van Slater and Cassandra Morino, she has planned their final adventure down to the accompanying music. For the most part that means securing booze, reminiscing, and attending their final party together to a 22 song soundtrack. Structurally the game, darts between present day and reflections among the friends with each chapter introducing a song via fourth wall break where Stacey turns to the camera and delivers a paragraph or so about the track you're about to hear with the energy of a daytime radio DJ. The game itself is the "mixtape."

That mixtape itself is a big problem. A few of my peers have dissected the playlist, noting the unlikelihood that a suburban white girl would be listening to all or any of it. This is a fun exercise albeit one that grazes a larger point. The layers of artifice in an Australian dev team crafting a video game adaptation of a teen movie tropes (itself hopefully convincingly argued by yours truly as an artificial simulacrum of American adolescence) means accuracy was of little concern. That there is a 2011 song on the tape emphasises this. So, looking at this as solely the decisions of team of people long past their teenage years looking to soundtrack a story of teenage rebellion from the lofty perspective of the 2020s — it's a very white soundtrack.

The only two songs by black artists are two of the oldest songs on the soundtrack — "Have You Seen Her" by the Chi-Lites (1971) and Alice Coltrane's "Galaxy in Turiya" (1972). By no means bad songs, but as most of the soundtrack features music from white artists from 1969 to 2011, it comes across a little strange. Hip Hop is one of the newer genres of music in the grand history of the medium, and while it builds on many older genres including jive and reggae, in popular history it's credited as being invented by DJ Kool Herc at a block party where he used two turn tables to isolate the "beat" (highly percussive) part of a track playing it longer as that was often the crowd favourite part of the song. The year Herc debuted that technique was 1973. That Mixtape features music by Black Artists before but not after the popularly cited birth year of Hip Hop is a grimly funny coincidence. This feels worse given an exchange between Stacey and Cassandra:

Stacey: "What's the music situation at Camille's party? DJ?"

Cass: "Yeah. One of her friends from LA. DJ Dropout. Hip Hop. House stuff."

Stacey: "I'll bring some CDs. Just in case."

Quick aside: suburban kids in the 90s were 100% banging LA rap. They were going bar for bar, word for word with no pauses and no substitutes. They were saying "nigga" in hi-fidelity. Slurs in flac. This isn't relevant.

My criticism focuses on Hip-Hop because [I'm black and] for many it does soundtrack being a street rat and living in opposition to oppressive authority and the law.

On the topic of "the law" and race, there's Cassandra. Cass is a biracial teenager and, until recently, a parent's dream child. She's top of her class and an athlete to boot. At some point, before the events of the game, Cass decides to break bad. Being the perfect little girl was too suffocating. Her arc is nothing earthshattering but Cass is, by far, the most interesting character in the game. Her father, the Asian police officer Morino, is the only parent present in the plot. Every other parent is a narrative spectre existing only in photographs, voice over, or faceless cameos. As a result, Officer Morino pulls double duty. He is the most prominent racialised character within the game and the representation of parenting knotted up in legislation, oppression, and debilitating expectation.

There's a moment when the gang is hanging out in Cass's room when Slater bluntly asks her, "why does he have a stick up his ass?" Cass doesn't refute this but notes that her grandad was the same and being Asian in the 50s in the States probably shaped their outlook. If the teen-comedy is this breezy narrative that sweeps you up in a world funnier and more painless than our own then this is the moment the wind stops and gravity send the plot hurtling down to earth. It's not that a comedy cannot broach the topic of model minority, racism and immigration, but it requires the plot to spotlight it to skewer it or at the very least a deft hand to zoom past it with a wink. The audience and the artists both in on the joke. Slater goes "Oh... fair." We never touch this again.

When Officer Morino appears on screen for the first time he is well past his boiling point. To him Cass has fallen in with a bad crowd — she's skipping classes and smoking weed. He doesn't trust her. She's not his little girl anymore. Importantly, Stacey isn't the only one leaving town; soon, Cass will head to LA for university. In a cruel and desperate bid to get his way of thinking through to Cass, he not only grounds her for the weekend, ruining any plans she had to spend with Stacey before the latter went off to New York in the morning, but informs her that she will not be heading to LA. Instead, she will enrol closer to home, maybe commute to school. Neither Cass nor Stacey takes this well although for different reasons:

Stacey: "You promised you'd go to Camile Cole's party"

Cass: "What?"

S: "You promised. It'll ruin my soundtrack."

C: "I'm fucking grounded."

S: "Sneak out."

C: "I wouldn't have to sneak out if you weren't leaving."

S: "Whatever man, just be there."

At this point, we have to talk about Stacey. Here she takes an unreasonable and selfish position albeit one I don't take issue with. It's all but explicit text that Stacey is some kind of autistic. Earlier in the narrative, during one of the reflection scenes, she explains her relationship to music and her headphones.

"Most of the time if I don't have music on, I get the panic. Time feels like it's drifting by. I feel like I'm wasting something. Sometimes I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be feeling. Some days I feel nothing at all. But if you pick the right song, it holds you in the moment, it gives you meaning. Because the music's going somewhere and you're going with it."

This is one of the many times in this game where music is used to explain an outlook on life. Here it is established a dependency or a way to cope. It doesn't blunt the insensitivity of what Stacey says but it gives context for why this is a big deal for her. I want to be clear, I didn't want this game to soften Stacey's characterisation. I like this prickliness. I like how much she sucks. That said I don't think she is interesting enough to anchor the narrative for the game's entire runtime. It's why the second half of the game is stronger, the camera drifts, even if it's for just a bit.

However, it is in the moment after this conversation that the game fully loses me. We stay anchored to Stacey in an extended skateboarding sequence. She's flipping off cars, mail boxes, whatever and exploding them as The Smashing Pumpkins' "Love" blares in the background. This goes on for minutes. The mixtape is ruined and she needs catharsis. Keep in mind that Cass has just experienced quite possibly the worst moment of her life. All her plans up in smoke in an instant as she is betrayed by her caregiver. Her father and her have been at loggerheads, but this is the man that until very recently she was moulding her life to make happy.

But we're stuck with the white girl. Her rage takes precedent. By the time we see Cass again at the gang's hideout in the woods, she's calmer. She did sneak out and she is going to the party. We don't get to see her make that choice. The developers are willing to break away from Stacey when necessary for a gag such as in the mini game where the player pilots an inebriated Slater in a video rental store but not to afford Cass her moment. She is understanding and patient in ways that Stacey never is. She defers her anger despite it being the most justified. The plot never realises but Cass trades one emotional jailor in her father, for another in her white best friend.

The selfishness of perspective extends to how this game approaches music. The truth of the world of Mixtape is that Stacey is prodigiously good at making playlists. Her relationship to music is atypical and passionate. She'll make a snap judgement on a person solely based on which bands they like. Again, she's an asshole. When I think of the mixtape as an object in culture, I associate it with sharing. It is a symbol of romance, you make a tape and you give it to someone you fancy. You make a playlist for a road trip to cater to everyone in the car. As far as the game is concerned, Stacey is the only character with taste in music. The mixtape, the game's soundtrack, exists as proof of this. It's the soundtrack of her last day because of her batshit plan to ambush an executive in New York. The mixtape is how she plans on securing that job. Her plan to secure her job scuttles the weeks of planning that her, Slater, and Cass have done towards a road trip. It is the source of persistent sniping by Cass who really wanted her best friends there to see her off to university.

It's not that Mixtape doesn't understand that Stacey's attitude is not tenable for healthy friendships but it's not willing to fully condemn it. There's no real comeuppance. The allure of the playable movie musical montage is too strong. To have a proper about face would be to indict the structure of the game; Stacey would have to cede control of music supervision. The closest the game gets is giving Slater one of the fourth wall breaks. He gets to introduce Joy Division That's it. She still controls the music at the party, she still goes to New York.

There is a moment in this game that I love. It's a one-on-one between Slater and Stacey. Slater is your archetypical stoner but also an artist and musician. There's a running subplot throughout the game where Stacey tries to convince Slater to let her listen to his album and it leads to my favourite conversation in the game:

Slater: "But you make an album - that says too much. It says this is who I am in this period of my life. And I know no one's going to listen to it, but if they did...they'd see...me. Don't ya think that's weird? I don't really wanna like put that out into the world."

Stacey: "I get it. Music is serious. You gotta show me though."

"No way."

"Why not?"

"You'll dissect it like a frog. You'll see my insides. What if you listen to it and realise I'm a psycho or something?"

"If it captures you right now, I'd want that...I'd wanna listen to that. If I could take you to New York on a cassette tape. I'd be braver."

It's powerful sentiment that puts the rest of the game in a weird relief. This part is just pure projection but I cannot understand Stacey's relationship to music. Music is the medium of memory for me. It's people and places, if I hear a song it brings me back in time. That's nostalgia right? I should be in lockstep with this game but I don't want to craft a moment to the music. Songs bring me back to faces. I can remember voices, the touch of skin. I can recall conversations, good and bad. La Dispute makes me think of Mari. Gucci Mane makes me think of Max. Amy Winehouse reminds me of my cousin. Chance the Rapper's Acid Rap mixtape, specifically, makes me think of Jeanelle and Romahlio. Stromae reminds me of Ariel. Adele reminds me of Sarah. Buju Banton's Driver reminds me of Paul. I have too many songs for church. A few for my parents Every Kartel and Movado song from like 2008 to 2010 is maybe just an era of growing up in Jamaica, god. Everyone I ever dated has a song if not an entire artist. Memories of graduations, funerals, everything can be summoned, and some times only be summoned, through music.

Music in Mixtape feels isolating, almost competitive. Taste is a thing wielded like a weapon. It's a means to build yourself up. It's the small town nerd shit. You know the hyper fixation that makes you special while the town "normies" go crazy for something "dumb" like sports or whatever. They don't like the right things or if they do they don't like enough. This too feels like a coming-of-age movie trope, the kid who needs to leave because their dreams are too big for the area code or are just plain misunderstood. There's usually some comeuppance there right? You get your dream but at the expense of something you took for granted. I don't think that quite happens in Mixtape. Not in any way that matters at least. Stacey might say she'll miss the town though is there anything in the dying throes of the night that demonstrates that? She gets her perfect day but I guess Slater gets to break the fourth wall once.

I keep thinking about one of the opening lines of this game where Stacey urges you, the player, "always make a soundtrack, because pretty soon you won't be listening to music, you'll be listening to who you were." At first I thought about finding new music and my parents. I don't think either of them have heard a new-to-them song in the past 20 years. They've found their soundtrack for the rest of their lives. I think that when you start closing yourself off to new things, that's when age sets in. Carcinization into a curmudgeon. But that's clearly not what that line is saying, right? This is a depicting an American suburban life that never existed or didn't exist for the vast majority of Americans much less the world. It's boasting a playlist of all but one song predating the year 2000. So what does this warning mean? Who is it for if not the developers of this game? I still don't have an answer.

Mixtape is the kind of game that if it hit me at an earlier point in my life, I would be all about it. Playing it now, at a fresh 31 years of age, I oscillated between boredom and repulsion. That makes me feel good if I'm being honest. I get to laud my superior taste over one person, me. The person who I was at 12 years. The person who hated himself, his culture, and insisted on bright, sugary, empty American cereal for breakfast.