Back in my day....

I was in the car the other day, engaging in my usual, safe, mother-of-three driving (which entails yelling at my children for fighting, while watching them in the rear view mirror, steering with one hand while, with the other, trying to retrieve Thomas the train from the floor, after Little Man has catapulted him across the main cabin for the tenth time, not understanding this results in him no longer being in his sticky grasp, all while simultaneously drinking a large coffee) when I was asked by my (now, no longer fighting) children to put on some music. And after inserting and ejecting the fourth Hannah Montana/Green Day mix CD that was skipping like it was being played by a dj on crack, as it was scratched beyond all recognition, I thought to myself, "God DAMN, just give me a good old fashioned cassette tape!!!"

I realize there are many benefits to CDs. The recording is of higher quality, you can immediately skip to the track you want to hear, they are very difficult to break and, well, they just look cooler, but unless you have the time to meticulously care for and store these little gems they wind up virtually useless. Admittedly, to me "meticulous care" means putting them back in their cases instead of stacking them, uncased in the glove compartment, or, let's be honest, letting them slide around, naked, on the passenger-side floor, but back in my day, that side of my Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra was six inches deep in uncased Erasure and MC Hammer cassettes and they played just fine.

It astounds me that my children will never listen to a cassette tape. Their pink boom box has no deck and cars today would sooner have them as cigarette lighters. But in my youth, tape ruled, and I think for good reason. Sure, kids today can wait for a song they've just heard on the radio to be released on iTunes and buy it with a click of the mouse, no waiting for Mom to drive you to the mall so you can buy "Ice Ice Baby" at Sam Goody, but when I was young, you could have the song immediately and for free! It only required sitting in your room all night, listening to the radio on your baby pink, light teal or peach double deck boom box, waiting for said song to be played and then pushing the "record" button. Sure, the opening bars were covered up by the dj giving the one hundredth caller Bon Jovi tickets and the end of the song segued right into a Wendy's commercial, but it was yours right then and there!

The double deck boom box was a teenage bootlegger's dream! You could copy your friends New Kids on the Block tape without worrying about pesky copyright infringement, or spending your babysitting money. And where would we be without mix tapes? Kids today know nothing of the joys of creating a mix tape. Sure, sure, you can create an iTunes playlist for someone, but would it include the sound of your inept fumblings as you struggle to hit the "stop" button at the right moment, or even possibly, a personal spoken message? (In high school, you think you want the kind of boyfriend who does that. I had one and you don't.) You could labor away on the "liner notes" and even glue your own photo onto them to show through the clear plastic window (that was after you had the film developed, another Neanderthal technology our children will marvel at)*. I'm tearing up a little as I write this - the first gift I ever gave H was a mix tape I labored over for hours. Each selection was carefully chosen, and I included a note about why I had picked every song and what it meant. It's like a time capsule each time we dig it out of our college memorabilia, and when I hear one of those songs on the radio I can actually remember what song came after it on that tape. Sure, kids today can churn out masterfully created CD's complete with professional sounding fades, photo-shopped labels and perfectly printed liner notes, but there is nothing quite like getting a mix tape from the guy you really, really like, and maybe love, with the title of songs like "You're My Home", in his handwriting.

Yeah, yeah, cassette tapes had some major drawbacks. Of course, the incessant rewinding and fast forwarding trying to get to the song you want - quite annoying when the single you've been hearing on the radio is three or four deep on the tape, and you aren't familiar enough with the new album to know which song is which. And tapes were not impervious to maniacal little hands getting their pincer-like grip on the thin tape wound inside and pulling it out with glee.*** But a pencil stuck in one side of the tape and the patience to sit there and wind it back in usually did the trick. Hell, you could even splice a broken tape with scotch tape in a pinch.

I know some day I will be the butt of my kids' jokes, as they roll their eyes in smug superiority, when I am still referring to recording things as "taping" them, much like my teenage amusement as my father called jeans "dungarees". But my love for tape technology, with its simple durability and accessibility will never die (a post on the joys of video tapes to come). And if I have to be that crazy old lady who still has a functioning cassette deck - a purchase I am determined to make before it's too late - just so she can listen to some old tape from back in the day, then so be it.

*No, Ferone, I am not forgetting our special tape "DJ Jazzy Jen and the Fresh Mare - She's the DJ, I'm the Rapper" - bad photo and all.
**Babysitting catastrophe of the highest degree when the little hell spawn got his mitts on my new Depeche Mode tape. Even worse story? My friend Jen's cat ate the insides of a cassette tape and the vet told her mother to just let her poop it out. It made me think of anal paper cuts and makes me shudder to this day.