Cassettes

My niece is into music CDs now. Apparently, CDs are considered retro and cool by kids today, much like vinyl records were considered retro and cool by my generation. I guess nobody really buys physical music mediums anymore. Everything is digital downloads. When I was a kid, the big thing was tape cassettes. Other than the size and portability of them (I mean who would like to have a record player mounted on the dashboard of their car?!), there was no redeeming advantage of tape cassettes. The sound quality was poor compared to vinyl records and CDs, and there was absolutely no way to skip to a particular song like you can with CDs. You either listened through the entire cassette each time, or you stopped it and rewound it over and over again for one particular song until you wore the tape out completely.

The other thing that sucked back in the day was trying to figure out the name of a particular song or who sang it. There was no Shazam or Google. You had to rely completely on the radio (or MTV) to tell you. This particular exercise of listening for a song on the radio could frustratingly take days. You'd listen day after day, hoping that the song would come on during those 30-60 min you spent in the car. And if it did happen to come on, you hoped the DJ said the name of the song and artist, so you could go buy the album on cassette later (and then wear it out). Most of the time, luck would have it that you might go hours without hearing your song and turn off the radio just before it came on. Or that it would play in a no-commercial set with the DJ only saying the name of the last song. Or more likely, you’d turn on the radio right in the middle of the song, and the DJ would have decided to say the name at the beginning on that particular day.

We also didn’t have the instant gratification people have today, like being able to download a song whenever you feel like it. Kids nowadays don’t know the pain that we went through to get music back in the day. My brother and I would stay up late (sometimes for several nights in a row), waiting for a song to come on the radio, so we could record it on our repurposed cassette with the paper stuffed in the “do not record” hole. Sometimes, you'd get the last few words of the DJ talking at the beginning as the song cued up (annoying). But other times, the golden times, you'd time it perfectly and hit the "Record" button at the exact right time. There was definitely an art to this. And for the next 3-4 min, you were jamming away to your song, finger hovering over the "Stop" button, waiting for the end, riding a high that you'd finally timed your song perfectly. And then the stupid DJ would inevitably come on and start talking through the last 15 seconds of the song and ruin the entire thing! Cussing his mother for bringing him into the world, you'd rewind the tape and cue it up for the next night when you'd try again.

And we weren’t even supposed to be up late, listening to music. We were already taking our lives in our hands by doing it the first time, and now we'd have to try again! And maybe the next night, you'd have the same thing. The DJ plays five songs in a row without interruption and then decides to talk through the song you're waiting for. Or maybe the next time you hear the song, you're in the car with no way to record it, and now you have to wait another four hours before it comes back on the rotation again. All for a poor quality recording of a song that you probably won't like in a few days anyway!