The Medium is the Message

The last few days I’ve been playing my old cassettes on my tape player that I use for my Davey G. practices, and have been rewarded with the unending joy of the wave of nostalgia they bring. Suddenly it’s 1993 all over again, and I’m listening to They Might Be Giants “Lincoln” album, or the Fastbacks “Zucker,” both were bought in the early ‘90s and neither of which I’ve played because of the continuing trend toward analog obsolescence which have led to Cds and MP3s and the like. These are some of the old albums which are so old and fundamental that I never bothered to update them, so they sat unused in boxes around my house. While it would be possible to purchase them again on CD or download them, the way I remember experiencing this music was always on cassette, with all its inherent flaws yet without some of the issues of Cds (Say what you will about the sound quality of a 15 year old tape, but at least a tape doesn’t skip.). The music would be the same but the experience would be vastly different.
As I brought the cassettes to work and connected the tape player to the stereo, I can also see the wave of nostalgia wash over my late 20-something co-worker. He sings along to every song, songs neither of us have listened to in 10 years. It’s a strange kind of boundless joy I haven’t completely understood--I was truly ecstatic when I listened to the MCKnicknix, an old and forgotten New England band who were my first punk rock show ever, and then Jawbreaker on the flip side (whom I saw twice, getting to shake Blake Schwarzenbach’s hand at the show in Connecticut where a fight broke out during the opening band’s set). It was great to liberate the near-defunct technology and hear the songs of my youth in the form I remember. I find myself wishing I still had my old Dead Kennedys and Circle jerks cassettes which I played out long ago. I know they are still out there in some form, but I know it wouldn’t be the same. That’s not such a bad thing, as a scratchy cassette is nobody’s friend, but I guess that’s not the point. Because (make my corporate Comm. teachers at UB proud) as media guru Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message.”
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