This Is Now

And things were different then

I don’t feel like I’m getting old, very often, but sometimes I feel older.

It’s usually when something reminds me of how things were once different — and often it’s the trivial instances that resonate most. I’m heading home today from Woodstock, NY, where I’ve been on several trips to attend a writers’ room. I stayed in the same (very nice) hotel I’ve been in for the previous three weeks (the Woodstock Way, which I can highly recommend), but in a different room this time. Unsurprisingly, there’s a low key musical theme to the hotel’s decor (each room features a turntable, and you can borrow LPs from reception). On one of my room’s walls was the artwork at the top of this piece. It’s by someone called Floyd P. Stanley.

I’m not a nostalgic person in general. I’m pretty happy to be in the here and now, having its cool new stuff. I don’t feel a burning need — nor do I gain notable comfort — from the foods or TV shows or music of my youth. But for some reason, instead of unconsciously dismissing cassette tapes as clunky and slightly risible dead tech, I found myself standing and staring at the image, suddenly remembering how things were when I was a teenager, and such objects were an intimate part of my daily life.

Recalling how limited the availability of music was. How you had to own the records with the songs you wanted — usually bought after a long period of saving up your money — or else borrow them from a friend, a negotiation which required them getting something from you in return. You would come to know those albums intimately, as they were the only music you had guaranteed access to and so you’d listen to them over and over again. The records and tapes you possessed had to be put somewhere, too: there was a whole industry of storage cases for such things, that now doesn’t exist. They took up space. You could point at them, pick them up.

Songs were things, and you had to earn physical access to them — or else tape them off the radio. I used to do that during the daily Top 10 broadcasts, and as a result some of the songs on my temporary mix tapes would have snatches of DJ-speak at the start or end… “Dropped to number eight, after six weeks in the top five”. Over time these became almost a part of the song itself, or at least of the experience of listening to them — a baked-in connection to a time and place in the outside world.

Then there was the physical process of recording a more serious mix tape — with lots of stopping and starting, taking records on and off the turntable. Planning was required. Because it was an analogue medium — like a paperback book — you could see how much was left of the tape, and make decisions accordingly. Once recorded, the order of that mix would be locked both on the tape and in your head. It was immutable. Unlike the virtual playlists of today, was no shuffle function. Without fast-forwarding through a song, which was a pain and broke the mood (there were fancier tape machines that could skip, but they didn’t always work reliably unless you’d left a several-second gap) you were simply going to listen to the tune. There are songs from decades ago that I still half-expect to be followed by a specific other song, even though it’s by a different artist, because I heard them thus associated so many times.

A mix and its order had a primacy: it was what it was. Once made, it was an object you would then deal with and live with, and which could get lost or broken. It too was a thing, in the world. If a tape snapped or got tangled, that was the end of it, forever: it couldn’t be replaced without going through the entire process again, which you never would, because it was such a schlep. This wasn’t a list carelessly thrown together in seconds or auto-generated by AI: it was a treasured and (much though I mistrust the word) curated series of choices, into which time and soul had been poured.

And sometimes poured for other people, too: who amongst we Gen X-ers didn’t make a mix tape or two in the hope of convincing someone that we were The One, a person they might want to seriously consider going out with, on the basis of our fabulous and deeply mature taste in tunes, and the efforts we’d made on their behalf?

You might — for another person, or just for yourself — make a card insert copying the art, in your best handwriting. The one of Back in Black above brought me up short... remembering the times I spent copying artist logos by hand, most definitely including AC/DC. There were no scanners or phone cameras or desktop publishing apps in those days. You were like a medieval goddamned scrivener, doing it by hand with your colored pens, tongue probably sticking out of the corner of your mouth. In your parents’ house, knowing your homework was done and that someone would be cooking dinner downstairs. Someone who loved you. Your mom and dad.

I don’t feel old. But once in a while I miss being a child.

If you throw one of those tapes away, you’re throwing away a lot of hooks into the world. There are a very few, I realized through rootling around in our garage, that I’ve kept — despite the fact I haven’t had a tape machine in the house for well over a decade. Why? Because throwing them away would be like throwing away time.

Maybe Gen Z finds it just as valuable to be able to share lists of songs that don’t degrade, and can’t get lost. Perhaps being able to follow their friends on Apple Music or to shyly email a link to a Spotify list feels the same as painstakingly crafting a mix to share with someone you like. Just this morning I was getting a coffee in reception and one of the girls working there asked another what she’d done last night: she replied that she’d hung out at home and made a bunch of playlists, which she’d been meaning to do for a while. So playlists still matter, of course. But a “bunch”? In one evening? Does having access to millions and millions of songs, and the ability to gather them into easy corrals without dealing with old-fashioned tape, equal or even beat the deep-dive familiarity and imprinting that came from playing a new album countless times? I don’t know. I’m not one of them. I’m one of me.

I’m not saying “things were better then”, to be clear. I’m just saying they were different, in ways that... might have been better? Or… differently vital, somehow, in ways that made you more of an active participant, a person who built your own connections through time and effort, who was less of a careless consumer of endlessly available subscription-based product (which, remember, you don’t actually own).

Despite the in-built interlinking of the digital and online world, it feels like those analogue connections might have been a little more real, a little more human. And as if — old-fashioned and weird and limiting though that long-ago world might seem to the youngs of today — things aren’t necessarily better now, than they were then.

Or… maybe I’m getting old.