THERE IS A CERTAIN romanticism to a mixtape. The idea of someone waiting by the radio with their trigger finger hovering over the record button, hoping the radio jockey doesn’t talk over the first few notes. It recalls a time, not so long ago, when things were tangible; they took effort to create. When things were not instant and were built to last.
It is fitting that the cover of Libby Cudmore’s debut novel, The Big Rewind, features a callback to this nostalgic tradition: a cassette tape. It is fitting, also, that the novel’s plot, set firmly in 2015, is fixated on such a piece of obsolete technology. Structurally, The Big Rewind is a murder mystery, but this is a novel where the trappings of a certain lifestyle outweigh character and story. In this case, that lifestyle is a faction of hipster Brooklyn so fetishistic of the past that it runs on a barter system.
Today we hold millennials in disdain either for having grown up in an instant-everything society of MP3 playlists, where everything is easy to get and just as easy to dispose of, or for clinging, inauthentically, to a memory that they never earned. The figure of the hipster especially is trapped in this double bind. Can we blame them? Is it so unreasonable to want what their parents had? That is, after all, what they’ve been told since birth was what they should want. Millennials should strive for a monogamous marriage, 2.5 children, a house with a yard, and have it all by 30 like their parents did. But that isn’t the case for most twentysomethings, who have had to live in a recession, when computers do most of the jobs, higher education costs more than their parents’ mortgages, and there is always Netflix to distract them.
Cudmore’s novel is steeped in this cultural moment. The Big Rewind vacillates between crime novel, television teen drama, and a long playlist at the three a.m. hour somewhere left of the dial. These floating genres are then shrouded in the novel’s one constant: hipster culture. Cudmore, a frequent blogger and pop culture enthusiast, is old enough to have worked in video stores and young enough to think that mentioning Power Rangers is a charming and worthwhile throwback. Her writing is youthful and saturated with trendy television references, but that also makes it indigestible for anyone born before 1980. Her specificity creates an alienating “you had to be there” tone for those not in the know.
Cudmore’s blog, Glam Geek Writes, is entertaining and the perfect platform to discuss the things she adores, from old cop shows to comic book conventions. She addresses what bothers her, what she likes, and many of those preferences make their way into The Big Rewind. But a novel is often a more consistent art form, a physical object that is given an ISBN and meant to hold up longer than the lifespan of most blog posts. At times Cudmore attempts to integrate too much into the book, adding her favorite television shows, fashion choices, and 2015 slang without reservation. Like a blog, it reads more like a time capsule.
Indeed, despite its longing for 20th-century zeitgeists, The Big Rewind could not have been written in any other year besides 2015. Its references to Buzzfeed listicles, throwing shade, and Trader Joe’s will make the book less and less relevant as time progresses. It’s difficult to imagine anyone reading this book in five years without finding it outdated. Perhaps in a few decades some readers will look back on the novel and be drawn in by the next wave of nostalgia; for now, The Big Rewind seems exclusively for millennials-of-a-certain-age.
Cudmore’s narrator, Jett Bennett, is a wayward young woman living in the trendy Barter Street district of Brooklyn. Despite her only income coming from her temp job, Jett lives in a comfortable, rent-controlled apartment that her grandmother has vacated in order to travel. The area she lives in thrives on a sense of community and bartering. Everyone appears to know one another, at least superficially, and manages to stay knee-deep in necessities by trading instead of using cash.
That’s where Jett’s downstairs neighbor KitKat comes into the story. KitKat, who I hope did not give herself that nickname, is a local trendsetter who bakes “special” brownies for her local currency. She is the queen bee of the neighborhood and infrequent friend of Jett’s. When Jett receives a mixtape in the mail that is meant for KitKat, she goes to deliver it to its rightful owner — only to find KitKat’s been bludgeoned to death with a rolling pin. After dumping the brownies out the window, Jett calls the cops. Even though KitKat seems to have many closer friends, her sister asks Jett to find the real culprit behind the murder. This is because, through her temp job, Jett infrequently does paperwork for a private detective office. Jett reluctantly takes on the task, as well as KitKat’s cat, with only an undelivered mixtape to guide her.
Unsurprisingly, music is central to The Big Rewind, and it is music that remixes the usual mystery plot. While listening to the cassette, Jett tries to decipher what the mysterious sender was saying to her deceased friend. She believes the track list is essential to discovering the murderer in her neighbor’s case, and deciphering what songs mean becomes part of the process of detection.
Cudmore clearly loves music. Every chapter is titled after a song. The first chapter title is a Steely Dan song, followed by tracks from The Smiths, Prince, Genesis, X, and many more. Most of the chapter titles come from artists who formed or were popular in the 1990s, including songs from Hole, The Wallflowers, Toni Braxton, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Cudmore even includes a song by Syd Straw, an obscure singer-songwriter who appeared on Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The amount of commitment it must have taken Cudmore to compile these chapter titles is admirable but only adds to the quantity of music in the book and not to the quality of how it is utilized. The chapter titles, as a playlist, do not coincide with the drama of the novel, and Cudmore adds titles from artists she doesn’t seem to care for, like Billy Joel, whom she mercilessly makes fun of several times in the novel, which makes the endeavor seem self-congratulatory instead of useful.
One issue is the way Cudmore presents most of the songs. Music is not easy to translate on paper, excluding the literal transcription of sheet music. Unfortunately, so eager to mention an array of artists, Cudmore does not focus on the effect music has on its listener. Instead, throughout the novel, Cudmore names track after track, which causes the reader to scan over significant chunks or stop and think about the song and how it personally relates to them. In these moments, the reader is taken out of the story.
Cudmore handles the musical element best when Jett comes across the last song on the mixtape. It’s a song she has never heard before, and a Google search for the lyrics comes up empty. While sitting in the living room of the only person in Brooklyn she knows with a working cassette player, Jett is deeply moved by the song, and Cudmore breaks down the complexity of how certain songs can stir something in individuals. This is The Big Rewind at its best, when Cudmore steps away from the crutch of pop culture — as when she describes the hidden sadness of New York City; when her narrator finally stops thinking about herself and examines the dimness of draped windows, greasy sidewalks, and buzzing neon.
But overall, Cudmore relies too heavily on pop culture to carry her debut, and The Big Rewind falls into the trap of being too referential. It is in danger of being indecipherable. As much as the reader might want to read into the meaning of each song Jett references, they will never get to the bottom of what Cudmore wants to get across — because she has constructed her novel on other artists’ work.
It is not unlike how twentysomethings might wrap their identities around their favorite shows, films, and bands — each person a walking mixtape of their own invention. The maligned hipster is someone who translates earnest expression into proxies, permanent cultural objects that are frozen in time. Most millennials just want a fragment of what previous generations had; so they go to swap meets for mid-century modern furniture or first-press vinyl because, unlike most of the crap they can currently afford, those pieces are durable, will last, have lasted. At the end of the day, however, how much can someone adopt from other sources to create their own story?
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Taylor Mims is a Fiction MFA from Southern California. She is currently the Entertainment Editor at LipStickParty Magazine.