We used to go to the Olsson’s in Old Town Alexandria, VA, now closed (probably because of little internet thieves like Emily White; my actions had no discernable impact on their P&L of course.) We went into the back cassette tape room. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling cassettes. My God. Public Image Limited! 10,000 Maniacs! Guadalcanal Diary! The Fat Boys! I WANT TO HEAR THEM ALL AND I CAN’T HEAR ANY OF THEM. So you’d strip the plastic wrapping off when the pot-smoker cashier went to Armand’s for a slice, because it had this little magnetic strip that would get the anti-theft thing going at the door… slip it in your surplus army jacket… and shove that damn tape into your walkman as fast as you could, when you were out of sight.
—
Travis Morrison, Hey Dude From Cracker, I’m Sorry, I Stole Music Like These Damned Kids When I Was A Kid
As a 22-year-old who spends substantial cash on records every month—sometimes every two weeks—probably as a hungover habit from my misspent youth when I would drop whatever spending money I had (not much, so…roughly equivalent to the spending money I have now) on CDs but still downloads music from the Internet (“album name here” + “mediafire” + “.rar”), I have so many things to say about The NPR Intern Essay, the formats we choose (CDs have been obsolete to me since I got my driver’s license, because my car only had a tape player and it’s not like I’m going to buy a CD player for my apartment when I could just buy more records), how we listen to and consume and enjoy and recycle and share music, and maybe what it means for the future of music and the future of bands like the ones my friends are in. Maybe one day I’ll write them all down.
In the meantime, this essay from Travis Morrison is hilarious and brilliant and perfect and made me remember—for the first time in many years—that my exposure to The Dismemberment Plan was via “The City,” which my friend had put on a mixtape (like, actual cassette, you fuckers) for me in maybe 2003.
