Almost every day, I reflect on my younger years and find more reasons to want to invent time travel so that I can violently slap myself for innumerable, disparate reasons: poor choices in girls, not applying myself, my hairstyle, and the list goes on. Very rarely do I venture back prior to my thirteenth birthday, but today I realized that twelve-year-old me needs to be punched in the face by somebody with better taste: eighteen-year-old me. The reason is this: mixtapes are dead, and I was too blind and selfish to visit them on their deathbed.

Now, I know, this sounds just a bit reactionary, but hear me out: when you’re asked to rattle off the best mixtapes of all time, what names appear most frequently? Da Drought 3, Lupe’s Fahrenheit 1/15 series, 50 Cent Is The Future, We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2, and the S. Carter Collection, to just graze the pre-2009 surface. Then came Drake, and with him, the ability to launch a career off of a mixtape in a manner completely different from 50 Cent with his …Is The Future tape: these were mostly original songs. Post the groundbreaking So Far Gone, the mixtapes added to the canon include the aforementioned tape, Kush and Orange Juice; Return of 4eva; Acid Rap; Rich Forever; Sit Down, Man; and your personal Gucci Mane inclusion crowd the conversation. Save for Gucci and Rick Ross, what do these tapes have in common? They rocketed these artists to stardom, not by presenting purely-skilled rappers who still needed a nice polishing from a major label, but with a showcase of carefully-crafted songs with immediate commercial potential. While in no way do I believe that this loosening of the often-times harmful stranglehold that major labels have on artists impacting the mainstream conscience to be inherently bad, I have sadly found it coming at the cost of what was, for so many years, one of the most exhilarating structures for a full-length release.

Artists now feel pressured to release free tapes that look, sound, and feel anything but. Generally gone are the days where Lil Wayne turned on the radio and rapped over whatever glossy, of-the-moment single popped up on his local station and subsequently rendered the original artists obsolete. Who knows all of the words to F.L.Y.’s version of “Swag Surfin’”? Who could honestly remember the original artists on “Swag Surfin’” or what F.L.Y. stood for? I digress. We need rappers to actually body instrumentals if they’re going to take the time to freestyle over them. We need to forget the original artists, even for four minutes, even if the song is on rap’s Mount Rushmore. Enter Coke Boys 5.

I could wax poetic on the postmodern aspect of the mixtape, from the in-jokes created by the incessant DJ tag drops to the symbolism of KOOL slapping a highlight reel of white rappers, but these angles could apply to any release of his. Instead, we can’t overlook the necessity of a rapper (in this case, two) reminding us that beats are as malleable as you want them to be. Young Thug’s “Stoner” morphs from an obvious stoner anthem to the most complex laid-back post-Migos flow enigma complete with an ingenious re-envisioning of the original’s infectious hook; “Ay, what if that was a song about Bible times, though, and the chick fucked up, and he’s like, ‘I’ma stone her…she acting up, I’ma…stone her’?” “C.R.E.A.M.” eschews money for a Curren$y-esque lifestyle rap and, had the Wu not birthed the world’s most ubiquitous acronym since A.K.A. or A.S.A.P., grazes the clouds that the original is residing on. “Started From The Bottom” appears twice on the tape, possibly unintentionally, or even more likely, to remind us that the creeping beat was a canvas fit for more than passive-aggressive raps about the pains of being upper-middle-class. “U.O.E.N.O.”, the most remixable song on the whole mixtape, emphatically nails another hammer into the “Who is Rocko, again?” coffin (despite how good his performance on the song was) that TDE built the foundation of.

For those unfamiliar with KOOL A.D. and his work, the lyrical content will be alienating. For those familiar, your opinions have been etched in stone from the first verse you heard. But this is not where the mastery lies within the tape, or why it’s so important. This is not the best mixtape of 2014, and this isn’t even the best work KOOL A.D. released this year, as that title goes to the wonderfully weird WORD O.K. Instead, Coke Boys 5 serves as a pivotal landmark on the mixtape timeline, as the trend of the past five years has veered the Elysian, free-spirited nature of mixtapes off course and into just another structural mechanism that detracts from what makes mixtapes so great. It reminds us why we are so awed at raw lyrical talent, why every “Juice” needs its “Live From 504” to bat clean-up. Because in the unending competition that is hip-hop, the anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better showcase never loses its magnitude.