Anyone ever notice that VHS, Betamax, vinyl records, Laserdiscs, CEDs and even 8-tracks get lots of nostalgic love, but audio cassettes don’t? I mean, when was the last time you heard someone mention an audio cassette? Okay, so for me, the last time was today, but before that? Can’t even remember.
Why no love for cassettes? Well, I’ll tell you why I have no love for cassettes: they were very breakable, got mangled by car stereos very easily, they didn’t sound all that great in the first place, especially not after 18,000 plays– there’s nothing worse than trying to listen to a song when it sounds all warped and garbled. I understand that they were an important technological stepping stone, and they made music in the car much more practical, but compared to CDs or records they were pieces of shit. I had to put up with cassettes for a long time because I couldn’t afford a CD player and it made me sad, so I guess that’s why I don’t get very nostalgic for them.
That’s not to say that I don’t have any nostalgia for them, though. Cassettes were fun to play with. I used to use my dad’s equipment to record my own pretend radio show and other silly things like that. They also made piracy easy and fun– my dad knew how to use them to record audio from VHS tapes and we made my own bootleg Disney movie soundtracks.
Oh, don’t forget those read-along book-and-tape sets. I had plenty of those and I’m pretty sure they were part of the reason I knew how to read at four years old. I also had those Disney Children’s Favorites tapes– they had nursery rhymes and old-fashioned songs on them, classic stuff like This Old Man and Skip to My Lou. You know, those songs that kids these days don’t know anything about. I played them to death and knew every word because of the accompanying illustrated songbooks.
Also, one year, my dad bought me a Sony Walkman and I was in heaven– not because it was a portable cassette player per se, but because it was portable music. I’d ride my bike and listen to my Garth Brooks tapes and bootlegged Disney soundtracks all the live long day. (Yes, I said Garth Brooks. I was a stupid kid; leave me alone.)
I guess I had a little more nostalgia for cassettes than I thought I did.
June 30, 2009
Annette
Nostalgia Junkie 
8 responses to “They Just Weren’t That Great…Or Were They?”
kittymao
June 30th, 2009 at 12:14
I DID THAT TOO!
made radio shows, I mean.
I also used to narrate classical music.
And mixtapes were awesome. That’s how you used to tell someone you liked ’em. You made ’em a mixtape.
Ricky
June 30th, 2009 at 21:33
I am releasing an album on cassette in 2 weeks! Shael Riley and The Double Ice Backfire!
Cat the Vampire Slayer
June 30th, 2009 at 22:24
Mix tapes are the best ever.
I still have a cassette player in my car. (99 VW bug)..i use the cassette jack to play my ipod..
In10Words aka "Galileo"
June 30th, 2009 at 23:12
Surely you can’t forget the most important use for cassette tapes: Teddy Ruxpin. There’s something fairly comforting with a bear wearing a shirt flapping its lips to “Don’t Fear The Reaper”…
Annette
July 1st, 2009 at 11:35
You know, I’ve always wanted to try that.
ilovejunk
July 1st, 2009 at 15:21
I used to have fun when I was really little making “comedy tapes” which pretty much consisted of me shoving a tape recorder in my mom’s face and demanding her to “say something funny”. She never had much to say but was a good sport about it.
When I got older I would hold a tape player up to the TV to record music off VH1because I wanted a lot of older songs they didn’t play on the radio anymore. A lot of them came from Pop-Up Video so when I listened to the tapes I’d hear all the little “bloop” noises from the bubbles popping up. I still have a few of those tapes laying around, somewhere.
DJ D
July 3rd, 2009 at 04:07
Oh god, the recording off the TV thing. Man, my cousin and I were masters at that. I still have some of those. I used to be a mix tape fiend! I’ve still got loads of those too.
One particular important “taping over” was back when I actually had (don’t laugh) Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em by MC Hammer on cassette. Yes, I actually used my own hard earned allowance money to buy that. Anyway, several years later as I was getting into my angsty, gothy, grungy teenage years, there was a radio station in town that would play one Top 10 album in its entirety, with no interruptions, every Friday nights. I was starting to really get into Alice in Chains at the time and the album they picked one particular Friday night was Dirt by AIC. Well, I HAD to record it. So, I searched through all my stuff and couldn’t find any blank cassettes. Spying my MC Hammer cassette, I grabbed it and shoved it into the boom box. After the album was done and recorded (“Rooster” has a section missing in the middle where I had to flip the tape over), I pulled it out and scratched off all the MC Hammer stuff. Then, put a sticker on it that had “Alice In Chains–Dirt” written on it. That was my official symbolic shift in musical taste from child to angry young man…and I haven’t looked back since.
starwenn
July 5th, 2009 at 20:40
I made my own “radio shows” well into the 90s. The last time I did that was when I baby-sat my little brother during my college years. My parents had a cassette kareoke machine with a microphone that could record. I read my brother’s kids’ books, took songs off Mom’s extensive collection of cassettes, and created “newscasts” and “commercials” inspired by Dad’s morning newspaper and the catalogs in the bathroom. My brother still had a few of those until recently; I wonder if he still does.
I made piles of my own mix tapes in college, when my French teacher wanted us to record ourselves speaking what we’d learned for exams. I was working in the college’s media center at that time, and once the French tests were done, I’d tape songs from the media center’s vast collections of CDs, cassettes, and records. I’ve gotten rid of most of those recently as I’ve bought or downloaded the full CDs, but I still have a few Christmas collections.
More than the mix tapes, I still have a lot of albums on cassette, too. I’ve bought them for as little as pennies at yard sales, and some of them are quite collectable.