IÂ read this article on the BBC website today regarding the announcement that Currys will shortly stop selling equipment with cassette decks. Frankly I’m amazed that they still sell them - where on earth can you get a cassette to put in one anyway?
Of course I have to remind myself that not everyone is in to bleeding edge technology. There must be many people for whom the eternal bluray vs HD-DVD discussion is simply double dutch. And perhaps this is a good thing - for one it is certainly cheaper to be ignorant of the latest technologies, and perhaps it doesn’t actually have that much effect on productivity - I would hate to estimate the time I have spent trying to pair bluetooth devices reliably, let alone find a handsfree set that actually survives long enough for the warranty to expire. Even my trusty Xbox360 only lasted six months before dying a painful death, whereas the good old Sega Megadrive is probably still running quietly and reliably attached to the old black and white TV in the spare bedroom.
It’s a pity that nostalgia can only be felt for past events and scenarios. I don’t feel too much of it for anything in the past as I’m a current \ future focused person. However the death of the cassette deck does indeed remind me of many evenings spent compiling mixtapes. Back then compilations could only be compiled at slightly slower than real time. That is, to compile a mixtape once you had decided on a tracklist, would take slightly longer than the 90 minutes that the good old TDK tape would run for. Longer if your compilation order didn’t split comfortably in to two 45 minute segments. I wonder how many mixtapes I did and how much time I spent lovingly crafting them for people. And the nice thing was that people appreciated the effort that went in to a mixtape. I would always listen to them when given one… because there was a little bit of who that person was recorded in to every single one of them.
Some mixtapes can have profound impact on lives. Two come to mind for me. The first one was a tape I did for my then new acquaintance, now wife and mother of my child, Jenny. Shortly after our first snog I compiled her a 90 minute tape of all of my favourite music. From Radiohead and Morrissey to James, Blur, Chicane and BT, it said a lot about me and yet she didn’t run away screaming never to be heard of again.
The second one was from my mate Andy (hello Andy you know which one I am talking about). Andy has, er, a rather dark sense of humour to go along with some of his musical tastes, and after university we regularly swapped mixtapes by post to keep in touch. One such tape was in my car when it was broken in to. When the police came around, they told me that they had caught someone who they believed that was responsible for ripping out my lovely Kenwood stereo, destroying the steering column and smashing every lock on my lovely Calibra. It was likely that he would do some bird if a tape that they found in his pocket was indeed mine, putting him at some point inside my car.
“Can you identify this tape, sir?”
“Yes” I said, “that is my tape, from my car”
“Thank you, sir, PC Smith could you please record that the owner has indeed identified the tape as being his, a tape entitled ‘music to make your arse sore’ ”
“It’s not me, Officer, it’s my friend, he’s wierd.”
“That much is clear, Sir, thank you for your time.”
It’s just not the same with MP3s and CDs. Fire up itunes. Create a playlist. Drag tracks across. Order them. Hit burn. iTunes automatically creates cover art. Job done.
10 minutes max. All loving attention filtered out by the human \ computer interface.
So I do indeed mourn the passing of the mixtape. I shall miss it.
Incidentally, ‘Music to make your arse sore’ probably did what it said on the tin. The bloke who broke in to my car was sent down for six months 
