Let’s talk about dead music formats.
Filmmaker Allison Louie-Garcia recently went to a third grade classroom to ask children, all born in the year 2000, what they think about the decade we just wrapped up.
Are you ready to be super depressed about your age? None of them had heard about Napster.
Never mind vinyl records, cassette tapes, minidisc players, or CDs. These kids had never heard of Napster.
Since receiving my assignment to talk about the music formats that we’ve seen come and go in our lives, I’ve continuously attempted to position the course of my life at some drastic pivotal point. The truth is, of course, no matter how much I’d like to simply be special; I’m actually just really old.
My first experience with music was my mom playing her “The Big Chill Soundtrack” on vinyl.
I used to make radio shows for myself as a kid on cassette tapes. By depressing slightly the pause button while recording, I could speed the tape up. When replayed, this made my voice slow, deep, and dramatic. I cried laughing more than once at my rendition of “Barney the Dinosaur gets beat up by his kids”.
Cassettes, like vinyl, meant that you had to have a feel for the physical object that your tape was on. You had to know how to operate a needle on a record, and you got a sense of how long a tape had to be on Fast Forward to skip past that crappy song on the album. Your walkman committed evil anthropomorphized acts like “eating tapes”, or “slowly dying” when low on battery power.
You can’t drop an .mp3 out the back of your car, and let its guts slowly unwind across the pavement.
Enjoying recorded music took a knowledge set. Did you forget which album a certain song was on? You should plan on looking at the backs of album covers for awhile to figure it out.
People bought furniture in their houses for their music. CD racks came in elaborate shapes and took up space in your house. Large milk crate-looking things hold vinyl cases. Shoeboxes were ideal for cassette tapes.
Until we finally went digital, musical quality took great leaps forward throughout time. Tapes sounded better than vinyl, CDs (provided your stereo is set up well) sound incredible. Now, we have .mp3s, a format with a goddamned period before its name, played through a fashion accessory with no audio integrity whatsoever.
You know that your iPod compresses the quality of your music, right?
Ugh. I’m gonna go drink Metamucil or something. I’m old.