A Memory About Music

I know I sound old and patronizing but people nowadays will never appreciate music the same way past generations did.

It’s called progress and it has a lot of advantages. We now have Spotify, YouYube, and Apple Music. And that’s wonderful. We can find just about any song that was ever written.

When I grew up the music was on cassette tapes. You would go to a local market and buy one of these cassettes. Usually, they were not original but copied on some guy’s tape recorder. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it was a stereo with 2 places for cassettes and you could copy one of them to a blank one.

You didn’t have the option to shuffle and skip. You bought one of these tapes and listen to an album for weeks and weeks. I remember that we would listen to this day and night until they would wear off. We knew the lyrics inside out and I probably remember most of them today.

Music was a real connector

It was around 2000 and it was common for friends to come over and just listen to music. You would hang around for hours listening to the newest rock legend. Someone would discover some obscure Norwegian band. And then you would leave your friend’s house with 2–3 tapes.

I couldn’t wait to get home and listen to them.

When I was 14 or so, my grandad went on a trip to Germany and came back with a walkman. I used to spend hours and hours listening to that thing. It had stereo sound and I still remember how amazed I was about the quality.

It was bliss

Listening to a tape on an old walkman had poor quality.

But it didn’t matter. I would close my eyes and sit in the dark. These were my concerts. I could feel connected to the artist a lot more than if I comment now on their Instagram photo.

Of course, times are changing

I don’t even know what I want to say with this piece.

Maybe it’s just me being melancholic and thinking about some very different times. Maybe it’s hard to accept the passing of the seasons.

Maybe it’s that music, flowing through my fingers.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog