By Pappy
I love Japan, and go there every chance I get. I don't go very often, of course. It's not exactly the vacation hot spot that my wife prefers over, say, Disney World, and there's very little actual REASONS for me to go. Still, every chance I get, I go, and so far I've been three times, twice for short-ish trips (less than 45 days) and once to live (in Misawa which is in the northern section and still has the best weather I've ever been in). I love it.
One of the things I like so much about Japan is all the completely off-kilter stuff I stumble on in stores. Off-kilter to me, I mean. I'm not lacking of perspective to the point where I think off-kilter to me means off-kilter to the world.
Anyway.
Last time I went, I saw a three pack of these odd looking things. Thinking they were the next wave of electronics that will eventually blow up in America, I approached closer and saw that they were actually cassettes.
CASSETTES!
Oh man, cassettes bring me back. I remember being a kid and getting a Walkman for Christmas and how it was the most mind-blowing Christmas gift I had ever gotten until I turned 14 and got a guitar for Christmas. A Walkman meant I could listen to music whenever I wanted. I could listen to WHATEVER I wanted. I had freedom in this slightly bulky thing that totally had a clip so I could attach it to my Ghostbuster belt. That was the beginning of music for me. I could steal tapes from my parents and listen to "You Give Love a Bad Name" as many times as I want and no one is going to harass me about it.
And think about how smart this was for my parents to invest in. I'm not above admitting that I listened to a lot of New Kids on the Block (always interested in the fairer sex, I was SURE that one day I would be in a situation that demanded me serenading a girl with one of their songs from their catalog. This day never came and I have been incessantly mocked for my musical taste since - why did EVERYTHING they make have to incorporate neon pink?!) and I bet the fact that I could plug in headphones was nothing short of a god-send to my parents.
I loved my Walkman and used it all the time. It started out white, but was on the darker edge of gray when it finally gave up the ghost of functionality. I never noticed a ton of people using Walkmans, but perhaps this was because of where I lived. I imagine it was much bigger in the States and maybe kids there were riding the buses in silence, the Walkman being praised by the bus driver the entire length of his route, but I didn't know for sure.
Walkmans were very personal things. Now we have MP3 players (and just before that, MiniDisc players), but something about the Walkman made it cooler than just about anything else and, after years of pondering this, I have figured out what that was.
Walkmans were a musical Twitter. Think about it. You have your own feed that you picked (the cassettes that you picked) and you weren't relying on some conglomerate to tell you what to listen to like you would the radio, nor were you restrained by the idea that the people around you would judge you based on what you were listening to (unless you TOLD them you were listening to NKOTB like an idiot). it was completely personal.
And it was also limited. AA batteries don't last forever. Neither do cassettes. You have only two sides to make the most of your experience and, when you step out of buying an album on cassette, you enter my favorite part: mix tapes.
If the 80s has taught me nothing else, it's that mix tapes are the way to a girl's heart and I learned from pop culture VERY early on in my life that the goal of my existence on this floating marble was to find the girl - the RIGHT girl - as soon as possible so she doesn't disappear making my quest for happiness harder, marry her, and STAY married to her because there's nothing better than all the history that an old married couple has.
Of course, now that I'm older, I have much different ideas, feel sad about my single-minded devotion as a child, and am very much pro-divorce, though it looks like that pro-divorce stand won't happen in my marriage (fingers crossed!).
Anyway, mix tapes were a LOT of work, but that work turned into an art form the more it was practiced. If you were trying to woo a girl, you didn't want to come right out and make the mix tape be 100% love songs. Have some subtlety for crying out loud! But you might want to pepper them in among the mix, with a number great enough to plant a seed that maybe there's an undiscovered relationship that will end when we're 212 years old and dying together after a long and happy life by each other's sides, but few enough that, if this is rejected (as was the case 100% of the time, oddly enough) you could easily claim that you just thought they were good songs.
That's all.
Just good songs.
But in the meantime, while they were listening to the music on their Walkman, you would know that you had their complete attention. They were, in essence, yours. This was before multi-tasking. You couldn't give them a playlist that they could kind-of pay attention while they checked their email, updated Facebook, or played Fruit Ninja. They may be able to read while listening to music, but that was generally about it, and how many kids really loved to read?
So they would put on headphones on the bus and pop in your cassette - your HAND-CRAFTED cassette - and let you and your taste take them for a ride while they gazed out the window, perhaps after a rainstorm, droplets slowly picking up speed as they angle down the window. They'll listen to the tape and then take it out and realize that you had decorated the labels on it with various that were painstakingly added. After all, have any of you tried to draw on such little labels with the clumsy hands of a child? It's tough. They would see the art, they would appreciate the time it took, and the amount of care that went into it. The choices of designs, paired with the color palette and then juxtaposed with the music itself, culminated in a complete piece of work that was nothing less than your creative heart on your sleeve, if that sleeve was on the shirt that someone else happened to be wearing.
Today, the same amount of care just isn't there. Anyone can make a playlist and it can be as long as you want it to be. You can tap it to another phone if you have an NFC-equipped phone, and your target can listen to the music that was chosen, complete with changing volume levels and an undetermined length, all wrapped up in a package that includes NOTHING. No decorations, no color choices, JUST the music.
I'm sorry, but that's just not the whole package.
Walkmans and cassettes require care. You couldn't bring your entire collection out and about with you. You had to look at the day ahead of you, the tasks you needed to accomplish, the mood you were in or wanted to be in, and pick accordingly. This was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade every day of your life and you had to choose... wisely...
Now you can ignore everything ahead of you, plan nothing, and merely react to your environment. Open your door and oh, it's misty out today. Stabbing Westward it is! Or you'll be working and think that you're really in the mood for something cheery - really, really over the top kind of cheery - so you put on Walking on Sunshine.
But if you were forced to plan your days like in the days of cassettes, and you DIDN'T plan for these instances, you were boned. But being boned is not a bad thing, necessarily. Every time you think you're boned you learn something, even in a case like this where you learn appreciation of the music you didn't bring, as well as appreciation of the music you DID.
When you were a kid and you were just starting your music collection you would buy and album and then do what? If you were anything like me, you would wear it OUT playing it so much. You would soak up every detail that you possibly could. As a guitarist, I would listen intently to the guitars alone, and then when that started to bore me, I would focus on what the drums were doing. No stone was left unturned and I loved everything the music offered me.
Unless the music was awful, but that's beyond the point here.
Today music is cheap and disposable, with no appreciation of the art.
Cassettes forced this appreciation on you. You could either plug in your headphones and get away from your coworkers or classmates and listen to the same old tape, or you could surrender to the boring world that is Real Life.
Yes, cassettes were awesome. I miss them. As much as I love having access to a large portion of my music from my iPhone’s hard drive (and ALL of it via the cloud of Google Play), I’m still nostalgic for the past where music seemed to matter more.
Of course, this makes me wonder how the fans of vinyl feel about music when it became portable. Perhaps they’re of the mind that if you aren’t sitting a chair, cans on (or hi-fi speakers blasting) and doing nothing but obsessive over the completely awesome album artwork, you aren’t giving the music the respect it deserves.
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