- Eddie Izzard
For most people, their love/hate relationship with technology is due to loving how technology makes jobs easier, and hating it when they can't figure out how to get it to do what they want it to do. I suppose I have a dual personality with technology, but not in the way most people have.
For one thing, I've always loved technology. I have had a life-long love of owning and playing with gadgets. I see setting the time on a car's digital clock as a challenge, not a hassle (and to date, I have never found a car's digital clock I couldn't figure out how to set). I'm looking forward to the even bigger and better technology we'll have in the future.
I guess if there technology aspects I dislike, it's seeing the cost of things go straight down after I buy them, and also seeing new-comers get stuff the easy way. It pisses me off that some mp3 player or computer or other device that I spent a good chunk of money for 5 to 10 or more years ago, is now not only something that costs a tiny fraction of what I paid, but has become so obsolete that it's hard to even get rid of it. And on the second point I mentioned: it pisses me off that these music bootlegs and rarities that I spent a hard time acquiring back in the 80s, can now be had by some 14 year-old schmuck with a connection to Limewire or YouTube. But back to the first complaint...
Growing up in the 1980s, the vast majority of my music wasn't on CD. And it wasn't on vinyl, either. It was on cassette. With all these stupid "Vinyl vs. CD" complaints these days, people who are too young, too old, or too forgetful of the 80s seem ignorant of the fact that the cassette tape was the most overwhelmingly popular music medium of the time. I must have ended up with at least a few hundred tapes.
Did CDs exist? Sure, but that was something only the elite audiophiles listened to. (I find it ironic that there are audiophiles who detest CDs and worship vinyl, when 25 years ago it was just the opposite.) It was still a pretty new medium as far as the American public was concerned. Prices were high and the selection was limited. I didn't get my first Discman (portable player) until the early 90s, which took 4 AA batteries menacingly, and skipped with the slightest imbalance. That's what you'd have to mount in your car if you wanted to hear CDs while driving, too.
Was there still vinyl in the stores? Sure. But you couldn't play a record in a Walkman. You couldn't play it in a car. You couldn't keep vinyl in your pocket. Tapes were easy to trade at school. You couldn't dub vinyl-to-vinyl at home. You couldn't use vinyl to record music off the radio, or record your own band's songs in your garage. You could fit more music on a tape too -- more than CD! So tape was king.
What first prompted me to switch to buying CDs was 1) the fact that some labels were starting to release albums on CD only, and to a much lesser extent 2) I fell for the marketing gimmick of some CDs having bonus tracks not available on the cassette version. The first of these I had to deal with was the EP "Miscellaneous Debris" by Primus. I couldn't find it on tape anywhere, so I broke down and bought the CD before I even had a CD player. I called up all of my friends to ask if they had not only a CD player but a tape deck hooked up to the player, so that I could dub a copy to listen to. I called up everybody. Nobody seemed to have such a set-up. Finally, a stoner I knew named Danny told me that he could tape off of CD, but sounded kind of reluctant about it. He later said "Well...it sounds a little bad because I have to hold the boom box up to the speakers to record it." No thanks, Danny.
Slowly but surely, I ended up replacing most of my tape collection with CD. In recent years, I've even purchased mp3s of titles I never ended up replacing on CD.
Are tapes completely gone from the face of the earth? Not really. I can still find blank tapes at places like Walgreens. It's still the cheapest recording medium, easily. Digital recording is of course getting cheaper and cheaper, but it typically doesn't allow you to simply rewind and record over stuff. I keep a small tape recorder next to my bed as a dream journal.
But I still have all those other tapes to deal with. It's a lot of STUFF. More on that in the next blog entry.
