MUSIC BEFORE TIME

Por Victor C Drax

 

If you were born after 1990, what I’m about to tell you is going to sound insane. Bear with me: imagine a world without the internet. No more torrents, no more YouTube, no more Google. To buy stuff, you must go to stores (actually going, in person) and to watch movies, you must go to the theaters.

 

Hey: chill out. Breathe in, breathe out, don’t panic. Try not to think about the death of Facebook and Twitter (yes, you will have to interact face to face with people) and focus on what you’ll get. Like, uhm, going out more. And… uh… fresh air. Ok, being without internet sucks, yet we, children of the eighties and before, managed. Before the apparition of Napster, the concept of using the internet to download music was kind of abstract. It was like some new disease: you knew it was there, but you didn’t know anyone who had it. Nowadays, if you listen to something you like on a movie (because you’re not getting it from Mtv), you download it. You download the whole album, you download the complete discography of the artist. Music is easy to get and, arguably, easier to consume. Have you wondered how did we get by before the download thing existed? Well, we had ways. We had tapes.

 

Tapes (also known in my South American motherland as “cassettes”) were a rectangle of plastic, a little bigger than your Blackberry. You could go to the record store (crazy, I know) and buy two cd’s or four tapes that were, more or less, the same thing. You had to switch sides when you played it and it didn’t give you the commodity of picking the song you wanted by just pressing a button, but at least you got the complete thing, the full album so to speak. In my early teens, I would go with a bunch of friends to these stores and sneak tapes to my backpack, some of them from bands I liked, like Aerosmith and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, but most of them were virgin tapes.

 

Now, why on earth would I want an audio tape that has no sound? Because you could record in them. This is where radio comes in.

 

I’ve been on The U.S. of A lately and it’s been a pleasure to confirm that, if you listen to the radio, you might get good stuff (I distinctly remember Billy Idol), but here, in Caracas, radio motherfucking stinks if you’re a rock fan. Not only you’re not listening to whatever new music is coming out, but you don’t even listen to old hits. Lame as shit, considering that in the age of tapes and cd’s, radio was our dealer. Of course they would play girly crap like The Backstreet Boys, but if you were patient, you would hear Alanis Morissette, Metallica, Soundgarden. I mean, music that doesn’t suck. I can’t count how many afternoons I would stay in my bedroom, drawing whatever fantasy concept I had in my mind while the radio played shit I wanted to hear. At the first notes of a song I liked, I’d jump to the cd player and hit the “record” button. Sometimes, the dj would announce what song was coming and you were set up to make your mixed tape. I had so many of these things that I would forget on which tape was a specific song I was looking for.

 

Everyone with some years behind says this, but those were the golden days. Because there was no internet, you couldn’t get all the music you wanted; cd’s were sort of expensive and variety wasn’t that big. You had to create a network of friends and share the cd’s you had, so you would make tapes. That’s how I got most of Queen’s works (and half of Iron Maiden’s). If you played them enough (and you can believe I did), the tape would get damaged and sound would be fuzzy. It was time to send your cassette to music heaven… or the used record store.

 

Tapes were also a great gift. You had an argument with your girlfriend? You made her a tape. Today, most everyone has an iPod so you can’t really give music in an analogous way, but back then, if you found the songs your girl really liked, you would at least make her smile for the gesture (provided your offense wasn’t that big anyway). And if you forgot your anniversary, there you had a quick present.

 

The easiness of having music with the internet is a mixed bag for me. Of course you can get to any work of any artist with just a few clicks, but I remember the day when all the work you had to do for music paid off. Tapes (and cd’s in particular) were a wonderful thing to walk home with. They would be a work of art and you wondered how the booklet inside would be —now, all you get is a file.

 

God, I feel old.