I miss the cassette. I took great care to hit unpause/record while dropping down a stylus to create many a tight mix on a Maxell. In retrospect, it lead right into the way my iPod shuffles around today. My automobile still has a cassette player in the dash. 99.5% of the time it’s used for the iPod adapter, but once a year or so, I’ll dig through the closet and find a tape from 1987 and use the deck for what it was originally intended to do – just to keep that blood flow going and to remind the Sony head unit of it’s original intention. The music usually sounds dated, but I am brought willingly back to my thoughts and preferences from 20 years ago. It’s like an audio-diary, complete with a cheesy “Dear Jay,” intro. In my teens, I didn’t keep a diary and I damn sure didn’t write much.
Pictures are different. You pose. You’re ready for them. They only capture a single moment. 90 minutes worth of music could take several days to document, never mind finding and creating a cover insert… In the land of “Web 2.0″, I’ll hereby consider cassettes an ”audio retro-blog”.
April 25, 2007 at 10:52 am
I think I know what you mean man. I always like to go back through some old mixes and see how I was feeling on that particular night. Music can bring back subtle feelings that we otherwise would forget.
April 25, 2007 at 2:09 pm
One night when I was probably 16 or so, I stayed the night at a friend’s house. We spent the whole time taking turns, introducing each other to favorite songs, and alternating them onto a mix tape that I still have today.
Then there was the humiliating and yet strangely sweet memory of carefully crafting the perfect mix tape for some boy who would never, ever appreciate the amount of time and effort involved.
Let’s see some of the playlists for those old cassettes, yes?