I’ve been clearing out my study. I’m a hoarder, and it’s an essential process once every year or so…if I’m honest, occasionally two!
At the bottom of a yet another box of ‘memorabilia’, I found this.
Back in the day, when I was a Computer Science student at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, I had very little money. My dad had bought me a decent stereo with a twin-tape cassette deck. My music collection comprised 90% cassettes, borrowed from other people’s vinyl albums and ‘taped’ (copied, in analogue format) onto these flexible little fellows.
I loved the artwork of albums in the 70’s. I used to ask to take the loaned albums into one of the department stores that had a ‘Photo-me’ booth. There, I would hold the vinyl cover up to the camera to get my own image, which would then be sellotaped onto the cassette’s label.
How the world has changed…
Now, most of the time, we don’t own music – just the right to access it…
Looking back on this memento from so long ago, I felt a great sense of loss of the ‘closeness’ we had to music, back then – and its preciousness. I remember having an album of Crosby, Stills and Nash as a Christmas present. All that seems to be lost in this on-demand world.
Still… a happy memory at the bottom of that box. Think I’ll keep this one… Mind you, just the one…
©Stephen Tanham 2022
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.
http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog
I still buy CDs. If I buy electronic format I forget they are “there” or how to access them.
We have a wonderful Radio Shack Device that can record the CDs onto a flash drive. Then they can be played on car audio or computer since CD players are another vanishing breed. Windows 7 kept them in order and so do car systems. Windows 10 created another level of crazy and I have yet to figure that out. My IT guy (who is changing careers to real estate, a hotter career now) doesn’t know why this is confusing me.
I so sympathise, Darcy. There seems to me nothing standard nor reliable about the whole of digital music! I learned recently that CDs were/not as good at true hifi as the grooved records that went before… music tech basically lied to us to make us buy all our records, again… sigh!
Shh! I still have cassettes! Don’t tell! I have even managed to hang on to a clock radio with a cassette player plus one stand alone player. My cassettes have outlasted the other players…😳
You are a a true outlaw, Darcy. You can be in our gang any time you like!!