I have a couple of drawers in my home office that are entirely given to the relics of my childhood and teenage years. I don’t go through them often, they’re a bit cluttered, and to be honest I couldn’t tell you the entirety of what’s in them. Occasionally, though, I’ll be in search of something specific and end up opening one of those drawers to rummage through them. Inevitably, this leads to my pulling something out and spending some time in the fond memories attached to that object.
Some time ago, I was doing just that, and found some old cassette tapes. I was sorting through these, mostly because I’m constructing a list of songs that I used to own on this medium and that I now want to have digitally, when I stumbled onto an old mix tape.
Now, if you’re of a certain generation, mix tapes were a hallmark of your childhood. I think that a constant for every generation is the importance of music. It filled my years all the way through high school and college, with songs coming to represent specific moments in time, certain events. When I was in high school, everyone had a mix tape or two alongside the rest of their music collection. I was an audiophile early on, and my pride and joy through my middle school and early high school years was the stereo system that I had assembled in my room. CDs didn’t become commonplace for a while, and everyone owned music on cassette. Even in college, cassettes were the way to purchase singles when you didn’t want to buy the entire album.
Mix tapes were different in many ways. When I stumbled onto this old one, it was a window into what I was thinking, what was important to me, my dreams and struggles at that time. Even though I can’t play them now …because who has the hardware to play cassette tapes anyway?…I think that the physical objects are important. Sure, we can reconstruct them with playlists now, but playlists are ephemeral, or at least they tend to be for a generation that seems content to rent and never own their music.
Now, I anticipate a (justified) philosophical argument here that music, like any other art form, isn’t intended to be owned, but permit to me offer a counterpoint. When I was young and I waited by the stereo, listening to my favorite FM station with my finger hovering over the record button of the tape deck, ready to press down as soon as I heard the opening notes of that favorite song, I was doing so because that song was important to me. The music had value, and was not expendable.
We’ve lived in a handful of apartments in our life, and some of them have been excellent places to live. They were always expendable, though. I knew we would never owned them, and thus never invested in them. I knew they would go away one day, and so never became overly attached. I’ve purchased albums, though, that I’ve nearly worn out on physical media. They were that important. I memorized the lyrics to those songs, often without even intending to, and can still remember many of them today.
A few months ago, my daughter and I were shopping at a bookstore. There was a section dedicated to vinyl, because it’s a niche now, and she was exploring. The conversation went something to the effect of:
“Dad, what are these?”
“That’s how we used to buy music when I was a kid.”
Often, when this same daughter wants to watch a favorite movie or program, one that we frequently own physically, she will just reach for the Apple TV remote to stream the program. Once I asked her why, and the response was that it’s easier. Certainly, I and everyone reading has done the same thing, but I think that the convenience has cheapened the experience somehow. While incredibly useful to be able to watch whatever whenever (especially when traveling), there’s a lost sense of discipline and community that occurs when you waited a week for a new episode and knew that all of your friends would be watching it at the same time that you were. Or, gathering with your friends at a theatre to watch a movie together. Having that within reach anytime I want insinuates that it is not as valuable, not a work of art but rather just data to be transferred over the wire.
Last year, my daughter received a record player as a Christmas gift. She’s become very interested in purchasing music on vinyl, and we’ve started shopping for music together. That’s a really great experience, and I suspect that, at some point, she’ll become aware of the value in the music she physically has rather than the music she can instantly access, because (hopefully, at least, in part) she’ll remember a event attached to that album when she picks it up to look at the cover…maybe even that she and I shopped for it together. And while I doubt that she’ll ever get to experience making a mix tape, I think that this may be the next best thing.