by Aurora Dimitre
I’m pretty sure listening to cassettes is improving my attention span.
Let me get this straight—I was born in 1997, so when I was growing up, cassette tapes were either books on tape from the library, or part of the suitcase full of rock cassettes that had been my father’s, but that me and my brother ripped to pieces when we were children. My mom, who graduated high school in ’96, only remembers having one cassette tape. She mostly had CDs[1].
My first portable music was an MP3 player. I had two of those before getting my first iPod, which was a Nano before the Nanos were touch-screen. Then I got an iPod touch. That was my last iPod. I have an iPhone now, but the only thing I ever listen to off of it is podcasts. I don’t even have any music on there[2].
I have a good-sized CD collection. But, see, with CDs, it’s very easy to skip around to the songs you want to hear. Say you have a Nirvana CD. Say it’s “Nevermind.” Say all you really want to hear is “Lounge Act” over and over. You can just do that. It’s one button. You finish the song, you thumb ‘back’, you listen to it again. And repeat. True, unlike an iPod Touch, you can’t just drag your finger and suddenly you’re listening to the sick-ass bass part[3], over and over and over again, but you can listen to the song over and over again.
Can you do this with a Walkman?
I mean, technically. You can even technically go farther—you can do the iPod touch thing and go straight to the part of the song you want to hear, assuming, of course, you know how far to fast-forward or rewind the tape. So if you get a new tape[4], and you don’t really know how long to let the tape run before you get to, say, “Sanitarium”, you just listen straight through. You might know that it’s the fourth song on the first side, and you might know that these Metallica songs are like, really long, but you might not know how long to let it run. So you listen to the first three songs[5], and then you get to listen to the song you really wanted to hear. And that, well, a, makes “Sanitarium” a lot more special when you can’t just thumb that back button, but it also makes you listen to the other songs. They might just be there to fill up tape-space when all you want to do is cry about track four[6].
And cassette singles—sure, you can go and buy a single off of iTunes. You can even get CD singles[7]. And CD single might have a bonus track on there, something instrumental or whatever, but a cassette single? Well, it might just be the clean version of the song, the uncensored version of the song, and some other random B-side to pad the length so the tape isn’t just two minutes long. Or, they might give you the clean version, the uncensored version, the live version, a cover of a Black Sabbath song, and two other live songs[8]. It’s still a cassette single. It’s not a full album. But it’s also not a dollar twenty-nine on iTunes for one measly song.
Another thing that can really be the same when it comes to CDs, is you start to learn the track listing for your tapes. This also applies to CDs[9], but I would argue that maybe if you have the CD, you’ll just know that “Sweating Bullets” is track five, “This Was My Life” is track six, and “Captive Honor” is track ten[10]. If I had a Megadeth cassette instead of a Megadeth CD, I would damn well know the name of every other song on that album, instead of just “Ooh! Symphony for Destruction! Know that one! And… Countdown to Extinction, that’s the name of the album…[11]”. That Megadeth album[12] was my car CD for like, a while[13], and I can tell you with some certainty that I never listened to it straight through, and mostly just replayed “Captive Honor” so that I could do the fun court part in the middle, and add “…of Arkansas” after state because I’ve always thought that was necessary.
Would it have been the same if it had been a tape? I mean, I don’t know, I’ve never played around with the tape deck in my car. But I can tell you that if I take that CD out in my Discman, I’m just going to be listening to the same three songs on repeat.[14] If I have it on cassette, I won’t. Which is kind of the beauty of a cassette single—they give you the option to just listen to that one song. You could also do that easily if it’s the first song on the album[15]. But mostly? Your favorite song is track four, and then you’re caught up in Master of Puppets and you just listen to the rest of the tape.
“Countdown to Extinction” is a really good example for this, I think, because I did have “Sweating Bullets” on my iPod touch.[16] I only had “Sweating Bullets”. I didn’t even know the other songs existed. I had “Sweating Bullets”, and I could just skip to the part of the song I wanted. I didn’t have to bother with listening to the whole song to get to that good part, and I definitely didn’t have to either memorize how long to run the tape or listen through four songs beforehand to get to it.
And the anticipation of the thing is what makes it really good. The best thing about “The Thing That Should Not Be” is the fact that it comes directly before “Sanitarium.” The entire last bit of the former song[17] is spent in anticipation for “Sanitarium.” You get jazzed. You get pumped. You wait. You can wait. You don’t just skip ahead because you can. And when you get to “Sanitarium”, you don’t just keep listening to the opening notes that make you cry a little bit over and over again. No, you listen to the whole damn song, and when that’s over, you flip the tape and you listen to the other side, too, because “Orion” is track seven and you gotta listen to that seven-minute instrumental.
[1] You could go into the class discussions on this; cassettes were cheaper than CDs, et cetera, I’m not going to go too deep into it.
[2] The entire reason I even remember my iTunes password is because it’s a password I used for like. Everything when I was twelve.
[3] Novoselic did good with “Lounge Act.”
[4] By new, I mean, if you win a lot of tapes off of an E-bay auction, and also the tapes are from 1986, because they don’t really make new tapes anymore.
[5] “Battery”, “Master of Puppets”, and “The Thing That Should Not Be”, respectively.
[6] This is more objective than anything, I mean, I GUESS “Master of Puppets” is even the title of the album.
[7] I don’t know if you can do this anymore. I do have one CD single, but I got it at Goodwill. It’s RHCP “Scar Tissue.”
[8] Thanks, Anthrax, I did need to have “I’m the Man” pounded into my head three times on one tape.
[9] When I was in seventh grade and loving The All-American Rejects more than anything, I did know the track order for their self-titled album.
[10] Or maybe eleven?
[11] I keep wanting to say “Disposable Heroes”, but that’s Metallica and I know that’s Metallica. It’s track five on Master of Puppets. First on the second side.
[12] Countdown to Extinction, if it wasn’t clear.
[13] My car does have a tape deck, but I don’t want it to eat my tapes, so I just use the CD-player.
[14] Probably not “Captive Honor”, because I don’t trust myself to not do the court part.
[15] Use Your Illusion II, lookin’ at you here.
[16] Yeah, it was because of a Homestuck video.
[17] Long title, running out of steam.
Aurora Dimitre is a young author from rural North Dakota. She graduated from the University of Jamestown with a Bachelor’s in English in 2019 and is currently buying too many cassette tapes off of eBay.