I wish my car had a cassette player. I’d be one happily nostalgic human if it did because I still have all my old punk rock cassettes. They’re stored in three gigantic cardboard boxes currently collecting dust at my house.1
As convenient as streaming music is and apps like Spotify, the reality for me is this: they don’t have all the artists I once listened to. They may have some of their material. Some, if that. But:
- Order of the Dying Orchid2
- Stick Figure Suicide’s Nice, Nice, Totally Badass album
- Shower with Goats demo cassette
- Operation Ivy’s Seedy album3
They are nowhere to be found.
I miss cassette tapes. I miss reading liner notes. Cover art. Extremely tiny lyric pages and band thank you’s. I miss going into a record store and finding an obscure punk rock band I had no way of knowing if I’d like until I popped it into my stereo.
I remember hearing the Dead Kennedys for the first time ever. Bad Brains. Blew my mind. Fundamentally changed me as a person.
I’m not saying kids today can’t experience something similar with a streaming app, but I feel, and I’m probably wrong, but I feel like the lack of a physical connection means something.
Popping that cassette into a tape player. Placing a record on your stereo. I remember pulling my dad’s Jimi Hendrix Experience album out of the sleeve, placing the needle down on the record player, and it crackling into action. Otherworldly as the music entered my bone marrow.
That means something.
Doesn’t it?
Footnotes
- The last cassette player I owned chewed up my Dead Kennedys’ Bedtime for Democracy album and I haven’t trusted a cassette player since.
- Spotify carries a 2020 album, but their shit from the late 90s and 00s is, well, interesting. They were a band that formed at James Madison University and put on what I would consider the greatest live show I have ever witnessed in my life.
- Matt Freeman’s bass riffs are absolutely insane on this album you’ve probably never heard.