Taped

I was struck by an interesting, out of the blue thought recently, as I worked away at my job. It happens. In fairness, I’ve been at the post long enough that my mind can safely wander a bit while I provide my customary excellent service to the company.

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The Preamble: We receive a lot of cassettes on donation. People ditching entire collections, purging attics and garages and crawl spaces of boxes full of cassettes. Honestly, a lot of it is stuff no one buys: Christmas collections, homemade mixes on blank cassettes, old country artists whose names are lost in the mists of time, Celine Dion. You get the idea.

But we also get some really cool albums, sometimes, ones that might even be difficult to find on CD. Those get bought up with fair regularity, so out there somewhere people are still listening to cassettes. I like to think they have old cars with tape decks, and these albums are getting second, third, fourth (or more) lives in the beat up old cars that rattle around my town. Either that, or the hipsters have found the store’s collection and are hoarding them all against some future day and a half when they’ll have perceived value.

My Out Of The Blue Brain Fart Was This: I grew up on cassettes. Yes, LPs were around, of course, but as a kid in the 80s I went for cassettes. The first album I ever bought was on cassette. We had Columbia House and BMG and it was all tapes. And I loved them. I played the whole thing, both sides. Drop it in and let it go. The deep cuts and filler tracks got equal play. We made mixed tapes, well, once we eventually got a double cassette deck, we did… They were all small, portable, and convenient. The nostalgia for them is strong. I was even nostalgic for that noise they made at the top of the side.

Now, I know they have a shelf life, that the quality of the physical copy can be suspect, that they hiss like crazy and I know the general sound quality is also far lesser than CD. Buying a cassette in a thrift shoppe these days is definitely a game of Russian roulette, too. And I know you’d need a super-expensive cassette deck to make them sound close to good. A cassette comeback is pointless and stupid. I know some bands are making cassettes again and that’s cool, have fun, but it shouldn’t happen on a large scale.

But I had this moment, true story, of thinking how easy and fun it could be to go back to them. I could get them even cheaper than CD, they’d work for a while or maybe forever, and I could just let them play like I used to do. I mean, I just let CDs play too, but they’re easier to skip tracks and, well, you get my point. They’d be easier to store, there’d be titles I wouldn’t buy on CD, and they are in seemingly endless supply. And yes, I understand there is a reason for that plenty.

In Sum: It was just a passing thought. I’m not saying I’m starting a cassette collection. In fact, I ditched a majority of my cassettes a couple of culls ago. If I was truly into it I’d have kept them all. Plus, I think the cassette deck in my Sony component stereo is on the blink, somehow, so all I’d have is my walkman. Wait, no, I have two walkmans (walkmen?), I think. Anyway. It’s not going to happen.

It was just a thought that passed through my mind, a wave of nostalgia. All I had to do, once I got home, mind you, was lie down and the feeling went away. But it was a fun flight of fancy and wave of nostalgia while it lasted.

You’ll say I’m nuts, no one should even entertain the thought of tapes, and I get that.

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Lol. Zack Gobshite. Good ol’ Zack.