Does anyone else miss cassette tapes? Hear me out on this one.

Like anyone else who’s not part of the “iPod generation,” I grew up listening to music on analog media. My folks had a record player, but later moved on to cassettes. For movie rentals, it was all VHS tapes. (I know this makes me sound like a crabby old man, but don’t worry, I’ll get to the point soon enough.) Once DVDs, MP3s, and other acronyms took over, these magnetic media were relegated to history.

Sometimes, I wish that weren’t the case. Don’t get me wrong, I love the clarity and precision that digital recordings can give us, but there’s just something “raw” about the older magnetic tape. Even during the CD boom of the early to mid-1990s, I still listened to tapes all of the time. At that point, CDs were still rather expensive, and portable CD players far surpassed portable tape players in price. (When you’re a broke high school student, you go with what your meager pittances can afford!) Not only that, portable tape players were a bit more reliable at the time; you didn’t have to worry about skipping. Sure, there was the dreadful possibility that your tape could get eaten, but that was relatively rare, especially if you took good care of your player. Lastly, there was none of this skipping around for a good song shit; people’s attention spans are so short nowadays, they barely listen to full songs anymore! In the analog days, you either listened to a full song, or indulged in the painstaking process of rewinding and fast forwarding. It was easier to just listen to each side of a tape all the way through, and I feel that gave you much more of a personal connection with the music.

Most importantly for me, however, was the practice of tape trading. As you well know, I’m a colossal heavy metal fan. MTV and the radio only played the popular bands of the day; how was I supposed to discover lesser-known bands or international ones? A very small group of friends and I regularly traded tapes with each other; they’d get them from other friends, who in turn got them from their cousins, and so forth. That’s how I discovered black metal back in the day! Nowadays, if you want to hear a new band, you just hit up their MySpace page or the iTunes Store for a sample. Quick and easy, sure, but it’s just not the same as those halcyon days of tape trading. It seems sterile, and there’s no “thrill of the chase,” as it were. Even when I started college, there was a pretty decent tape trading scene, though most of it was bootleg concert recordings at that point. (I still have a bootleg of a Slayer show recorded live in Japan somewhere!)

Analog is dead and buried, but maybe it’ll earn itself a zombie-like resurrection someday. I’ll be first in line to serve our new undead tape overlords.