Book: Love is a Mix Tape

From stereogum, which you should be reading daily:

"Love Is "Hey Jude" On Repeat

Every week (not true) Stereogum suggests a music book you should read. We like Rob Sheffield's Love Is A Mix Tape a lot. Early in the book (before it gets to the heartbreaking mix tapes) Rob tell us about an April '79 afternoon he and his dad spent with "Hey Jude."

As my dad and I sat around the house one Saturday afternoon, playing Beatles records, we started batting around the idea that it was theoretically possible to loop a version of "Hey Jude" long enough to fill up an entire cassette. All we had to do was press pause and lift the needle every once in a while, and fiddle with the volume knobs. A few hours later, we had a ninety-minute tape of "na na nas," along with many "yeah yeah yeahs" and a few "Judy Judy Judy wows." We listened to the playback, and I could not believe what we had accomplished. This was a new Beatles song that hadn't existed before. It was Something New, as the Beatles would say.

...

I listen to Hey Jude now, and I think two things: I never want to hear this song again, and in 1979, my dad was around the age I am now, and given a Saturday afternoon he could have spent any way he pleased, he chose to spend it with his twelve-year-old song, making this ridiculous little tape. He probably forgot about it the next day. But I didn't.

That is the longest remix of "Hey Jude." Segue. "