This week in Showing My Age, I want to pay homage to a lost treasure of my youth: the cassette tape. In the modern world of MP3s and streaming, there are paradoxically both more and fewer ways to interact with music, especially as professionally (and probably simultaneously commercially) curated playlists and the ubiquitous “Shuffle” function come to dominate music consumption. But in my day – cue wagging wrinkled finger and old lady sneer – you had to really want to have that music on demand. And the cassette tape was really the only way to go about it.
For those who are unaware (dear god I am feeling older by the second), cassette tapes were seemingly insubstantial rectangles of plastic containing magical magnetic tape that was able to play back music on fabulous devices variously known as boomboxes, Walkmen, or, less creatively, tape players. In the same way that albums are sold in MP3 format on Amazon or iTunes today, which is itself becoming borderline anachronistic in the age of Spotify and Apple Music, or that CDs were sold a couple decades ago, back in the 80s and early 90s they were packaged for the public on cassette tape. But these were no mere passive devices through which to listen to music – oh no. They were much more than that. Continue reading “Stuff I Like: Ode to the Cassette Tape”
Vince Staples is the master of sharp left turns. His go-to move is to set you up with a line that leads in one particular direction only to deviate quickly into unexpected terrain, as he does with lines like “I need to fight the power but man I need that new Ferrari,” or, “My momma was a Christian, Crip walkin’ on blue waters.” In addition to this knack for startling juxtapositions, his delivery is dirty and deliberate and deadpan, painting distinctive pictures while leaving you unsure as to just how serious he is at any given time. In the lead-up to his last release, Big Fish Theory, he said of the album to LA Weekly, “It’s Afro-futurism. This is my Afro-futurism. There’s no other kind.” He followed that up with an interview with Trevor Noah of The Daily Show in which he completely blew that comment off, stating, “I like saying stuff about black people to white people.” When Noah persisted, asking, “So that doesn’t mean anything?”, Vince responded, “Of course not.” 
