{"id":43558,"date":"2026-07-13T07:37:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T11:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vgu.tv\/?p=43558"},"modified":"2026-07-13T07:37:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T11:37:32","slug":"who-gets-to-be-the-mixtape-authority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgu.tv\/?p=43558","title":{"rendered":"Who Gets To Be The Mixtape Authority?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the top 20 reasons I want to make a personal list of my top 100 movies is Love and Basketball. I haven’t played any sport since middle school, never lived life as a young woman, and I’ve barely navigated waters of romance, but despite all of that, I adore Love and Basketball so much. I don’t need to go on and on about why that movie is so great, it’s already in the Criterion Collection, just go pick up a copy or stream it from there. But one reason I’d like to zoom in on it is its music. Something about both the sex scene after the dance early in the film and the final 1v1 game at the very end changed my life forever, and the songs that accompanied those moments helped. Both Maxwell’s A Woman’s Work<\/em> and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Fool of Me<\/em> perfectly complemented the nervous intimacy of making love to someone you love for the first time and the desperate desire one may hold for a lover that isn’t even theirs anymore. I still spin these tracks back, and several more from this movie’s soundtrack, and each and every time, I’m brought back to the emotions I felt when I first heard them, even without the visuals there to aid. There are several songs I’ve fallen in love with in this way, and all of these songs came to mind when I saw the discussion happening around the release of Mixtape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw Mixtape from afar and knew exactly what it would be before I ever played it. So, when there seemed to be such a fervor of discussion around it, I was surprised. Didn’t we all play Life is Strange and Night in the Woods over a decade ago? Didn’t we all at least hear about Bloom and Rage and Life is Strange Double Exposure when they released recently? Didn’t we all watch The Breakfast Club or Lady Bird or Juno or any other of the dozens of movies about white kids growing into white adults? How is yet another story about the same thing managing to ruffle so many feathers? Well, about half of that controversy came from people on Twitter and YouTube who I don’t respect enough to care about their opinion. But the rest came from people I know and respect, and it had something to do with why I didn’t plan on playing the game myself, even despite the high scores from critics.<\/p>\n\n\n

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As you can probably see from the last paragraph, thanks to plenty of movies and games, I know plenty about what it feels like to grow up white. Mixtape, despite the lavish presentation and fun soundtrack, seemed like yet another one of these tales, and quite frankly, I was sure I’ve had my fill. So, I saw the discourse, but didn’t add too much to it because I never want to speak too deeply on a game I’ve yet to play, that’s what those Tweeters and YouTubers I mentioned earlier are so great at. But in the middle of a recording of the Vidjagame Apocalypse podcast, that same discourse came up, and out of a desire to finally contribute to it with substance, and thanks to a launch sale price, I picked it up on impulse. But now, weeks after that, the discourse has moved onto different, likely more worthy topics, and I finally played through the game to see if it was actually worthy of my disinterest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And well, it wasn’t…kinda?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game looks absurdly gorgeous, even when playing the first hour on my ROG Ally instead of my main PC. A large reason the game looks so good is that it doesn’t aim to recreate reality, just feelings. You don’t need to see the pores in someone’s face to be moved by the emotions it makes, so you don’t. Plus, a lot of sequences in the game take advantage of screen filters and distortions to really bring out the vibes of the scene or even the song playing. And as you can imagine, there are a LOT of songs playing. The soundtrack fits the protagonist, which is to say it’s a great mix of obscure tracks from artists I may have heard of once before and iconic classics that I may have heard way too many times in my lifetime. Each track is paired with a novel little gameplay sequence that is often just slightly too involved and way too polished to just be a mini game despite their simplicity and length.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know that the idea of calling a game a “playable movie” is often intended as a slight against it, but here it is simply too fitting. There is interactivity, but it is more the sauce and garnish of the dish rather than the meat and potatoes. There’s not a thing in this game that gets decided by your actions as a player, instead you get to add flavor to the inevitable proceedings. The cast is always going to have an old cabin as a hide out, but after a very very tactile painting sequence, you can decide what design is on that door. You will always take polaroid pictures with your best friend, but you get to choose how close to each other they are in their poses, hence giving you control over how much you want to hint at a deeper connection. And when music hits, these sequences either feel like amusement park rides or straight up music videos, both by which I mean to imply are rides that you are taken on. To be clear, these rides are almost entirely delightful, and if I thought to whip out my camera (read: screenshot button) during them I would have immortalized the sights. But this is absolutely a game you experience more than play, and while I don’t think of that as much of a negative, it puts much more pressure on that ride being worth taking.<\/p>\n\n\n

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And that is where I am slightly conflicted, because when it comes to the story and characters of the game, it is exactly what I thought it would be. There’s a quirky girl who’s head is so far in the clouds that she forgets to appreciate the things right in front of her. There’s an airheaded friend who teases at a deeper inner life, but is ultimately more useful to the narrative as comic relief. There’s a newly rebellious spirit who’s breakaway from her parent’s ways comes to be her defining trait and struggle. There’s a cool girl, a girl the protagonist hates, a mean dad, a cool mom, a few trippy sequences of substance use, and every other cliche you can’t think of for an American coming of age story. I don’t think this plot is original in anyway, and largely due to that fact, I have trouble deciding if the plot itself is truly any good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if that’s the case, why did I drop a tear in its final moments?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the presentation makes the entire game. The vibrancy in which these cliche characters are presented make them feel larger than life. The tactility given to the interactivity of these common acts of young adulthood make them connect with me so much more. And the clever use of mechanical gimmicks throughout make the game feel like something handcrafted even more than its soundtrack. The biggest compliment I can give to the game is that it feels like it was made in Dreams, Media Molecules unjustly short lived game creation suite. The defining characteristic of everything ever made in that game is that you can feel the imperfections, the humanity, in every single one, no matter if it was a short film or third person shooter. Mixtape has that exact same quality, like thumbprints in the vase a loved one made for you in pottery class. It’s just that, I do still wish that my thumb looked a little bit more like mine ultimately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t care to play Mixtape originally because I have seen the story it’s trying to tell multiple times in film, but also games, so I didn’t feel like I needed to do so again. That stance comes less from a desire to consume less art from white people, but from a thirst and desire to consume more art from black people, and to maybe even have the wider game’s sphere hold it in as high a regard as a game like this. Of course, we had South of Midnight last year, games like Relooted and Aerial_Knight’s DropShot came out recently, and I’m eagerly awaiting the release of She Dreams Elsewhere. Black art will always have a space, even if it is separate from the often white mainstream. But when it comes to stories of this specific slice of life, the time where we grow into the adults we will forever be, I find it hard to think of many black games that tell that story interactively. There’s a Friends for every Living Single, and a Roll Bounce for every mid 90s. Why do we have no black equivalent of games like Life is Strange? Like Night in the Woods? Like Mixtape?<\/p>\n\n\n

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About a few months ago I volunteered for MomoCon for the first time. I’ve attended the convention nearly a dozen times over the years, but this was my first time helping out, and I did so in the Live Entertainment department, which was in charge of the Karaoke room. Every night of the convention, around 10pm, we finally allowed songs with swearing in them as most of the children will have left the convention at that point, and most of the events that happen that late are aimed at older con-goers. During this time, you could sing just about any word you want, just as long as it wasn’t getting spammed too often. I was helping out elsewhere when this happened, but on the first night of Adult Karaoke, the first person to take the stage was one of the volunteers I worked with performing Doja Cat’s “Aint Shit”. If you know the song, you know the term that comes before “aint shit”. Right after that, that young lady got a talking to, and from that point on there was now one word we can’t use in our songs. This later fucked up my plans to sing The Heart Part 5 by Kendrick Lamar, but I was able to swap it out for These Walls before my spot came up later that weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I bring this story up because the conversation I had with that young lady who stirred up so much trouble, and a few other black folks, popped up in my head when I thought about the lack of a black version of a game like Mixtape. When talking about “the nigga incident” we came to a consensus that the word was banned from Karaoke not because it would offend us, but because it would have made the largely white audience, and white assistant director, uncomfortable. If there’s one thing I know about white people in America is that they will do anything to not be uncomfortable. Sometimes I even succumb to the same urge, but as the source of discomfort for many as a black man, I have grown to succumb to it less as I age. It is this discomfort, this unwillingness to engage with the gulf of our differences, is what makes America the way it is now. And really, that’s what makes a lot of the game’s industry how it is. Hell, when I think about the term \u201cMixtape\u201d I don\u2019t think about the nostalgic cassettes full of songs sung by midwestern men with hair as big as their voices. Instead, I think of Datpiff.com<\/a>, and the blog era of hip hop that birthed artists like Wiz Khalifa, Wale, and Mac Miller. From the first introduction, a title like Mixtape feels like an indirect step on the foot of a legacy I hold dear, one that I sense isn\u2019t so valued by the culture that reveres a game like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe the reason we don’t have a game who’s soundtrack reveres Nas, Brandy, Luther Vandross, and other artists that defined my and millions of other black childhood is because it may just make white people just a bit too uncomfortable to see us in all of our truth, and therefore glory. Maybe it is a bridge too far to ask white people to try on the shoes of others that may never quite fit them in real life. Maybe if a Little Brother verse came on during a set piece, Rapper Big Pooh droppin a casual “nigga” might bring them out of the experience. Maybe as long as that’s true, I’ll have to look exclusively to music, literature, and film for black coming of age stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I can’t accept that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Another top 20 reason I want to make that top 100 movies list is 13 Going on 30. I fucking love that movie, and it’s tale of moving to fast to appreciate what is in front of you is still touching. 2019’s Booksmart would probably be ranked even higher. Hell, the often forgotten Alexa Vega flick, Sleepover, would definitely make that list too. And if we switch over to games, Life is Strange is literally my 12th favorite game of all time. I clearly have no problem stepping into the shoes of white people, and I refuse to believe it’s because these stories are inherently more broadly relatable or that I just have that much more empathy than others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I want the world to be better, or at least just different, than it is, then I have to actively reject the norms as they exist now. I’m sure that Cass, Stacey, and Slater would all agree that sometimes fleeing from the mainstream, widely beloved art to find themselves in other creations is a respectable act of rebellion. In that spirit, I will agree that Mixtape does indeed have The Touch of something special. But, for all the reasons I discussed, I have a deep desire for something more than an impeccably polished and vibrantly presented version of what I’ve already seen. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the top 20 reasons I want to make a personal list of my top 100 movies is Love and Basketball. 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