Play it again, before it breaks

I love music! Many types of music! If you pull up next to me in traffic and my windows are down, you might overhear anything from Jerry Lee Lewis to Porter Wagoner to Phil Harris to Outkast to Matt Monro to Wanda Jackson to The Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose to classical stuff, like Moe Tzart and Bay Toven. 

I grew up listening to radio and also the tunes I played on various record players. The first record I bought was Sixteen Tons by "Tennessee" Ernie Ford, a 45 single. I bought albums by the dozens, and switched to cassettes when that medium became large, and then went over to CDs when the digital revolution caught up to us.

To listen to a favorite song, I used to have to get the record, tape, or CD out and take it to the appropriate machine to play it. Now, after years of digitalization, the songs I want to hear are on an iPod device half the size of a pack of baseball cards...something else I used to collect by the score. I just ask the iPod to play the songs or artists I want to hear, plug in ear pods, and away I go, transformed into my world.

Now, all of a sudden, according to CBS Saturday Morning, the show that keeps its index and middle finger on the nation's cultural carotid pulse, the hep cats and cool chicks are getting into cassettes! What? Why?

That technology was a stopoff between vinyl records and digital music, and it was never intended to be permanent, as anyone who has ever seen 12 to 18 inches of their favorite song get wrapped around the capstan of a cassette player can tell you. Or the tape just breaks, and stretches, making Bonnie Raitt sound like Bob Dylan. Or the shell breaks, or the pressure pad wears out.

I guess it's cool for those who didn't live through the Golden Age of Tape to romanticize cassettes. They will soon find out the hard way, as the rest of us did when our tape of the Grease soundtrack bit the dust, there was a very good reason to move on.