The Cassette

Is the relatively early age of 27 a premature point at which to begin experiencing nostalgia? Maybe so, but I have memories of things that aren't there anymore. I may have mentioned that nostalgia was originally defined as being the lingering sensation of pain from an old wound. Most nostalgia seems to be of a favorable nature the way I hear it, and the thing I have been remembering lately is not an exception to the trend. The earliest storage device for music I know is the cassette tape, for that's what we had my whole childhood. The compact disc arrived for me much after it did perhaps for most, and so I had that much more time with the idiosyncrasies of it. You come to love the good and the bad of a thing, linked as it is with many memories.

I think I've written before about the mix tape of children's music I used each night as a boy to call the Sand Man. It worked sometimes, and sometimes it didn't work, but always it was a familiar element of the fading day for me. I remember a song about chicken soup and rice, among others. There was a song about a bunch of boys forced to share a bed, with one always falling out one side and trying to get back in on the other. There was a song about a great huge dog who was a friend to some boy. It wasn't Clifford the Big Red Dog; this was something else. That cassette tape could be for me something like the sled in Citizen Kane. I wish I had it now.

I also remember the tapes we had in my mother's car most of my life. There was a basket of them, and they represented the impetus for most of my musical tastes of today. There was Kris Kristofferson, there was Pat Benatar, Muddy Waters, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers and so much more. Every car ride of any length was marked by one of them if not more. To listen especially to tracks which were on that Kristofferson tape is the be plunged back into the general feeling of those old times if not to be placed in some specific event with which they are tied. It's almost as powerful a recall as smell, is such music.

A couple of other tapes come to mind. One summer, a cousin came to town and turned me on to a lot of things. One was crafting Warhammer figurines. Another was Marvel comic books and a disdain for their rivals DC. A third was hip hop and rap music. He made and gave to me a mix tape containing a number of enduring hits from the time, and I remain a devoted fan of much of that. Those who know mix tapes are aware that it's not just the songs on that tape, it's the associations created between them by means of forced juxtaposition. I wish I had that tape too.

The single store-bought tape that meant the most to me drove my taste in music for a number of years. It more than anything represented in an element of pop culture my adolescence. Probably I'm not unique in this. It was the breakout album by Green Day, 'Dookie'. It was this loud, fast and hard-hitting change of pace from anything I'd heard, and all I wanted was to play it again and again. The cassette tape didn't allow for picking and choosing the songs you wanted to hear, and that was just fine with an album like that one,which was just perfect from start to finish. It even had one of those allegedly secret tracks which could inserted much more stealthily then than it can be now on a CD or whatever we are to call the grouping of mp3s that now holds sway. It's hard to be romantic about that, and I don't know whether anyone will end up being nostalgic.