This weekend, my time was mostly consumed with sorting through and digitalizing
all the tapes from my now old car; a seriously tedious and time-consuming, yet ultimately enjoyable and reminiscent experience. It was rather cathartic to sort though all my driving music for the past 6 years, which in a way has weirdly documented me growing from a still adolescent into an almost adult. All of the mix tapes that I originally made for myself when driving originate from being 16 or 17, when I still had palpable access to a CD/tape machine combo. My mix tapes from that era in the cold light of 2010 are for the most part beyond embarrassing. There were a couple of tapes that had some still fairly decent stuff (i.e. Electric 6, The Darkness, RHCP), but as I didn’t have many CDs then (seriously I probably had about 15 good CDs), a lot of tapes were filled with awful pop tat that I can only assume I taped off the radio. Being the music savvy person that I now am it was incredibly mortifying to find the likes of "Pretty Green Eyes" and "Shooting Star" on a tape I was involved in.
So why bother sorting through these tapes if they were so shit? Why not simply toss them in the bin, where such obsolete formats and musics belong? Well actually I did throw all of my mixtapes in the bin without a second glance – they were truly dreadful. What I really wanted to document was the five mix tapes that my beau Ricky has made me over my driving years. Pretty much every year, Ricky has made me a new driving tape, with songs I know and songs I do not. Mostly songs I do not. These driving tapes have been so special to me because they truly were a labour of love, where Ricky would painstaking choose songs he thought I would enjoy or (choke) ones that expressed how he felt about lovely ol’ me. Plus since I was burdened with the horrors of a tape deck only car, they provided me with relief from the tedium of the radio and my quickly outdated personal mix tapes. For pretty much 6 years Ricky’s tapes have been the only thing I have listened to in my car, partially because his care and attention made me feel all fuzzy inside, but mostly because he provided me with solidly good music to listen to and discover. Going through all these tapes also made me realise one solid fact that I have trying to avoid for nearly seven years, that Ricky’s music taste is better than mine. Phew, that was hard. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still got damn good musical taste, especially for a girl, but Ricky really far surpasses me in the innovative and general musical quality of his choices. His record collection is just better, cooler, faster and stronger.
So anyway, most of the weekend was taken up by finding a tape player (hard), listening back to the tapes and writing down tracks and orders (fun but time consuming), making playlists on my computer of the tracks I already have (complicated), and burning those CDs of Ricky’s that I do not have, (both complicated and time-consuming). Phew! I have additionally decided that after listening to a bit more of Rihanna’s new album, I really hate that chick. I mean her voice is just so goddamn awful. I get that she is trying to relate to the whole dancehall ‘ting, but she just doesn’t not float my boat - sonically and musically, j’naime pas.
