Happy Birthday to Me!

I'm twenty-seven! Yay for me! Here's some nostalgia for you young whippersnappers.

Very-young children have recently asked, "What's a cassette?" when they hear me talking about music. These kids know nothing but CDs and MP3 players. Walkman? What's that? Huh?

Cassettes: the evil, unholy ancestors of CDs and MP3s/WMAs/VQFs/whatever.

These tapes were twice as good as their eight-track predecessors because cassettes had sixteen tracks. The audio quality was a little better as a result. Tapes were also smaller than eight-tracks, which was always a plus as far as storage space was concerned.

Tapes, however, had their problems. The biggest issue was the fact that the thin, brown tape inside the plastic housing would snap. This was particularly common if you had not recently cleaned your tape player. (Rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip - rub it over the head and rollers, then let it air dry. The swab was always either dark brown or black with gunk when you finished.)

When the tape snapped, you had to get a thin piece of clear tape and try to splice the two ends back together. Sometimes, this worked. You had a small gap in that part of the song, though, because you had to tape over the recording. So, right in the middle of the best cut on the whole album, you got a moment of dead silence. Lame? Definitely.

Cassette tapes did, in short, suck. I hated them with the intense, blazing passion of ten thousand suns. When we finally got a CD player, I was the happiest teenager in the entire county because I no longer had to deal with crappy, stupid tapes.

And that, oh youthful generation of music lovers, is why I'm so happy that I've had the privilege of enjoying CDs for a good chunk of my life.