The delicate charm of adolescence often hides in the smallest gestures: the spine of a spiral notebook, a doodled heart above a lowercase “i,” the jittery confidence of a handmade mixtape offered with hopeful anticipation. Adam Greener’s “Mix Tapes 2”, presented here as part of a limited edition of 25, doesn’t just memorialize this era—it embodies it. Rendered on the quintessential backdrop of ruled loose-leaf paper and filled with handwritten text, illustrated cassette tapes, and crude-but-endearing cartoon figures, the piece operates not only as an artwork, but as a nostalgic time capsule.

This second installment in Greener’s “Mix Tapes” series is a continuation of his practice: elevating adolescent artifacts into cultural critique, humor, and visual storytelling. It’s an ode to analog emotion, the tactile sincerity of DIY romance, and the absurd rituals of youthful self-expression before the internet flattened everything into templates.

The Medium as Message

Visually, “Mix Tapes 2” is striking in its commitment to authentic imperfection. Greener simulates the texture and line bleed of a real notebook page, complete with three-ring binder holes, a margin rule, and even the faint blue lines that guide school-aged handwriting. The medium is not digital mimicry—it’s intentionally handmade, scanned or photographed with the physicality preserved. This decision places the viewer immediately within a school desk world of mechanical pencils, trapper keepers, and passed notes folded like origami.

The layout centers around a vibrant, illustrated cassette—“Adam’s Super Romantic Mix Tape for Debi”—rendered with a near obsessive attention to detail. The cassette is a TDK FE90, lovingly labeled with red and black Sharpie, showcasing the artist’s eye for interval-accurate branding and nostalgic touchpoints. Tiny arrows, like annotations in a zine or comic margin, highlight details: “custom label,” “name brand cassette,” “custom intros + outros,” and the all-important declaration: “you rock.”

Above it all, the banner screams:

“ADAM’S AWESOME CUSTOM MADE MIX TAPES”,

in retro-styled block letters, echoing ‘80s mall signage or an infomercial header. The color palette—primary reds, blues, and yellows—reinforces the fun, hyperactive spirit of pre-digital design.

Nostalgia as Economy

But Greener’s work isn’t mere sentimentality. It critiques and pokes at the idea of commodified romance, even in its most innocent form. The artwork is structured like a business flyer, complete with tiered pricing:

• $2.99: select 10 songs (no label)
• $4.99: sweet custom label
• $9.99: I will DJ the entire tape with smooth intros + outros

This tiered structure mirrors the economy of playground capitalism—trading cards, stickers, cafeteria snacks—now repurposed into emotional labor. Even more hilariously biting is the “satisfaction guaranteed” clause, humorously undercut by:

“(minus a 90% restocking fee since you probably copied the tape)”

Greener here both celebrates and mocks the seriousness with which teenagers conduct these transactions of affection. The lines between marketing, performance, and personal sincerity are blurred—deliberately so.

Soundtrack of the Teenage Emotional Strength

Greener curates a tracklist of love songs—“the year’s best”—offering viewers a time-stamped emotional playlist. The selections include:

• “Never Knew Love Like This Before” – Stephanie Mills
• “Hurt So Good” – John Cougar Mellencamp (here humorously spelled as JC MellonCamp)
• “Think I’m in Love” – Eddie Money
• “Eye of the Tiger” – Survivor

These are not just songs—they are declarations, meant to be transmitted via magnetized ribbon and squeaky plastic wheels. Greener evokes the once-serious ritual of tracklisting: how a side A opener could be a coded confession, how a well-placed power ballad could mean everything. Mixtapes were personal narratives dressed as pop ephemera, and this list reads as a young lover’s emotional thesis—tender, obvious, clumsy, and deeply heartfelt.

The use of colored pens—green for Stephanie Mills, red for JC MellonCamp, and blue for Survivor—serves both visual hierarchy and emotional coding. Red is for pain, green for revelation, blue for empowerment. Whether deliberate or instinctive, Greener’s color choices reinforce the emotional landscape of the songs.

Handwriting as Identity

Handwriting, in Greener’s work, becomes both a visual device and a storytelling mechanism. The text ranges in size, color, and emphasis—some all-caps, others in script, some bolded or underlined, mimicking the haphazard way teenagers would construct posters or flyers for crushes, dances, or band practice.

The voice is unmistakably youthful. Lines like:

“Get the boy or girl of your dreams by making them their very own MIX TAPE!”

read like both sales pitch and diary entry. This is language without irony, absent of filter or finesse—a purity rarely captured in contemporary art.

In the lower right, a hand-drawn Adam shouts:

“These prices are so low it must be a mistake! (NOT A MISTAKE)”

This adds a fourth-wall-breaking self-awareness that prevents the piece from tipping into kitsch. It’s humor without cynicism.

Edition and Objecthood

“Mix Tapes 2” exists as part of an edition of 25, a detail that lends the piece an air of preciousness—like the tapes it references. Each print is part of a small batch, a finite expression. Just as a mixtape could only be duplicated with effort, so too does this artwork resist mass-production aesthetics. The edition status reinforces its object-like quality—even when experienced digitally, the piece feels like something tactile, folded and passed across a hallway between classes.

Impression

Adam Greener’s Mix Tapes 2 is more than a clever throwback. It’s a love letter to a lost form of expression—one that required time, patience, listening, and vulnerability. In today’s landscape of algorithmic playlists and swipe-right attention spans, this artwork reminds us of the emotional weight once carried by 90 minutes of curated music on tape.

But more than that, Mix Tapes 2 is about crafting intimacy in a chaotic world. It’s about believing that songs could carry meaning, that handwriting could substitute for voice, that love—even teenage love—was worthy of production, packaging, and delivery.

It’s a joke.

It’s a document.

It’s a memory.

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