Since I was old enough to use my brother’s stereo console tape deck, I have been making Cher mix tapes. Back then Cher was not very popular and there were no compilation cassettes or vinyl that spread across all her record labels, by that time of which there were five (Atco, Imperial, Kapp/MCA, Warner Bros. and Casablanca). So I made my own retrospectives of her best songs and separate mixes where I would corral all her hits together in one place. It all felt very serious and official. These cassette mix tapes were mostly for my own private listening.

When the time came to make Cher mixes for my friends and boyfriends, I had to think harder about it. By that time Cher had added even more labels to her roster and many more hits uncatalogued together (Geffen, Warner UK) so that they wouldn’t even fit onto one single 120-minute cassette anymore. It just strikes me now how amazing that fact is next to her continued unpopularity in music circles. We just accepted it. She’s been unpopular-popular for SO LONG we can’t even fit all these ‘bad’ hits onto one cassette tape anymore. *Shrug*

And by that time also, CDs were what most people played “mix tapes” with and they were even shorter. I still have a small stack of blank CDs (and no way to make mixes with them) and I can see they’re only 80 minutes. So that made for some judicious curating. Nobody puts up with a two-volume mix tape.

So, I made a thing back then called The Cher Sampler. I first made it on cassette and it had a fold-out, hand-made booklet with early Cher scholarly liner notes typed out on it. I remember I gave the first one to my new Sarah Lawrence friend Julie.

A few weeks ago I found the CD-case-sized square track list for the CD version of the sampler. I decided to revisit it with a YouTube playlist.

I’ve made other “Cher Scholar” playlists recently on Spotify and Tidal (search “Cher Scholar Mix Tape”). I made a Best Of playlist, playlists around themes. But this one is different than those and prior personal mixes for an interesting (to me) reason. Those mixes assume the listener already likes Cher.

The guiding principle of The Cher Sampler mix tape was the assumption that the listener already did not like Cher’s music.

The CD mix was mostly made for boyfriends, this being their first serious taste of Cher in all likelihood, straight men having abandoned Cher back in the mid-to-late 1970s. I did make one for my other Sarah Lawrence friend, Christopher, and others besides at his request to fill out his understanding of deep-catalog Cher. He grew up a Madonna fan, not a Cher fan.

But the straight boys were harder nuts to crack, if you’ll pardon the pun. (And what straight female had even ever tried before?) I wanted to show off Cher’s prodigious range in genres, (folk, international, standards, N.O./swamp R&B, western, soul, gospel, reggae, jazzy soul, electronica and rap represented in bits here alone), avoid the already-known, often flatter hits for the more voluptuous rarities never before heard.

I picked songs that maybe just warranted a closer listen (“The Beat Goes On” or “Look at Me”), as Cher herself deserved a reconsideration against her lingering stereotypes. I included the best of Sonny’s ethnic journeys (“Little Man”), songs Cher attempted in other languages (Italian, Spanish and even Xhosa) and songs with a thrilling vocal (all the five songs included from the Stars album).

The time constraint was important. Back in 2019 I made my boss at the time, Kalisha, a requested Cher mix and held nothing back at 34 songs. Online mixes have no time constraints. But this sampler did. We didn’t have all the time in the world here to get a straight man to reexamine his Cher prejudices.

So in recreating the mix here I’ve kept to the 22 songs in the original CD Sampler. If I wanted to add new songs, which I did, I would have to remove an equal number. I took out “All I Really Need Want to Do” because it wasn’t the best of her Bob Dylan covers and “Sunny” because that one felt more filler than fundamental.

These songs, it’s interesting to note (even if only to myself), are not even my favorites. There’s no “Masters of War,” “I’d Rather Believe in You,” or “Love and Pain” on this mix. No live version of “Danny’s Song.” Know your audience, as they say. I was trying to make this a mix that was not about me, but about how Cher could appeal to someone very unlike me.

Here it is, The Cher Sampler:

  1. The Beat Goes On (Sonny Bono)
    I added the writing credits purposely, to further strengthen her creds, even if slightly and covertly.
  2. Little Man (Sonny Bono)
  3. Needles & Pins (Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche)
    Because this is the most superior version of the song with its stronger bass and because ‘pinzah’ is not a word, people.
  4. Ma Piano (Gianni Meccia)
  5. Look At Me (Keith Allison)
  6. There But for Fortune (Phil Oachs)
  7. She’s No Better Than Me (Sonny Bono)
  8. The Click Song (traditional)
  9. Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You (Bob Dylan)
  10. Walk on Guilded Splinters (Dr. John)
  11. A Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done (Sonny Bono)
  12. Train of Thought (Alan O’Day)
  13. Mr. Soul (Neil Young)
  14. Just This One Time (Jimmy Webb)
  15. Geronimo’s Cadillac (Michael Martin Murphy)
  16. The Bigger They Come (Jimmy Cliff)
  17. Stars (Janis Ian)
  18. It’s a Man’s World (James Brown)
  19. You Take It All (Stuart McLennan, Bracegirdle, Brian Higgins)
  20. Chiquitita (Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus)
  21. Drop Top Sleigh Ride (McLaughlin, Ferras, Abrahart, Saint John, Crasta, Schick, Michael,  Stevenson, Hudson)
    Cher is not the best rapper but she’s not terrible and has the big cajones for trying it.
  22. I Got You Babe (Sonny Bono, arranged by Harold Battiste)