Cassette tapes are hissing their way back into our hearts

sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

No.  Just…no.  The most shit-tastic music format ever is now a nostalgia thing?  I have fond memories of playing tapes for most of my childhood and teenage life, but what a pain in the ass they are!  People say the same about vinyl, but your record player doesn’t suck the record up into its hungry mouth and tangle the shit out of it.  You don’t have to respool records with a pencil because it gets pulled out of its shell and mangled.  Oh, and properly cared-for records actually sound good.  That hissy tape you’re playing degrades with every listen, and eventually the tape will break…and so will your heart.  Sad emoji.

It’s cool to spool again as the cassette returns on a wave of nostalgia

Pause. Stop. Rewind! The cassette, long consigned to the bargain bin of musical history, is staging a humble comeback. Sales have soared in the last year – up 125% in 2018 on the year before – amounting to more than 50,000 cassette albums bought in the UK, the highest volume in 15 years.

…“It’s the tangibility of having this collectible format and a way to play music that isn’t just a stream or download,” says techno DJ Phin, who has just released her first EP on cassette as label boss of Theory of Yesterday.  “I find them much more attractive than CDs. Tapes have a lifespan, and unlike digital music, there is decay and death. It’s like a living thing and that appeals to me.”

What’s next?  Wax cylinders?  I can hear it now: “I looove wax!!  It sounds so shitty, like music played in a freeway tunnel during a sandstorm or something.  It’s sooooo cool and unique and retro and nostalgic.  Oh, and cumbersome to play and handle and store.  I bought the new Katy Perry cylinder and it broke after only 2 plays!  It’s, like, the best thing evarrr.”

 

iTunes hates me and my taste in music

That’s the only real reason that iTunes would inexplicably obliterate all the carefully-curated playlists I’ve had over many years. It happens at least once a year, and I’ve come to conclude that it simply loathes what I force it to play and its only escape is the occasional database seppuku. This time it wasn’t just the playlists that vanished — now iTunes acts like it can’t see my library at all. So goodbye playlists and all my nitpicky settings. Goddammit, iTunes…I’d leave you for good if there were any decent alternatives (though MediaMonkey comes close).

After rebuilding my playlists for the 487th time, a couple of years ago I finally got smart about it. I came up with a foolproof way to get those playlists back, and they’ll be up-to-date to boot. I’m probably not the first to think of it, but maybe someone out there will find it useful.

Here’s what to do. Let’s say you want to create a playlist for your favorite David Byrne songs (and why wouldn’t you?). First, create a Smart Playlist and configure it to show only songs that have “David Byrne” in the comments. Make sure “Live updating” is checked.

Next, when you want to add a track to a playlist, open the Info screen and go into the Comments field. Put something like “Playlist: David Byrne” and save it. That comment is saved right into the file itself.

Now, when you click on your David Byrne playlist, the song you just added the comment to will magically appear. Do the same thing with any other David Byrne song you want, and it’ll automatically show up in the playlist.

Using the comments and Smart Playlists together means that even if iTunes decides you’re unworthy of having such fancy-pants playlists and decides to wipe them out with no warning, you’ll never have to manually pick out your favorite songs again because the info is contained in the song files themselves, and those Smart Playlists will do all the work for you. iTunes can murder its own database all it wants, but it’ll never again be able to permanently take your playlists down with it!

“But what if I want to add a song to multiple playlists? OMG WHAT MUST I DO THEN???” OK, calm down! Jesus. No need to freak out about it. Just add multiple “playlist” comments to the song for different playlists, geez. I like to add a few spaces between them to make it easier to read when viewing them in the Songs view (remember to make the Comments column visible):

And that’s it! I first got this idea when I used to click the checkbox next to songs I wanted to sync to my phone. After several times of going through all that trouble and then losing all my work to iTunes’ abusive whims, I started using the Composer field to put the word “Checked”, and a Smart Playlist would show me what should have been checked but wasn’t, so I could easily identify and fix songs in one big swoop. You can use this Comments thing for all kinds of useful stuff. You can even make a playlist that contains all your playlist-commented tracks. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but you do you.

So today I’m rebuilding my iTunes collection and playlists yet again, but it’ll take a teensy fraction of the time it used to take. Wow…I feel, like, smart and stuff. I’d feel smarter if I could just give up iTunes altogether, and believe me I’ve tried, but I always come back to it because 99% of the time it’s great. I just come up with ways to get around its occasional weird behavior.

Nostalgia is the new…nostalgia?

I know, that’s a stupid title. But whatever, it sounded clever for at least two seconds…

OK, it’s time for a Curmudgeon Moment™.

I can’t be the only one who feels that we’re experiencing 80s nostalgia overload. There’s a relentless firehose of 80s memorabilia blasting us in the face from every direction: movies, videogames, toys, T.V. shows, etc. It’s reached the point where it doesn’t feel like a celebration of pop culture from our (my) childhood anymore — the marketing twats have discovered that people will buy anything that reminds them of anything from the 80s, and they’re milking it for all they can. Nostalgia from that decade is its own industry now, and it’s not going anywhere soon. At least, not until 90s nostalgia (ugh) overtakes it.

I think I first noticed this stuff a few years ago when LEGOs became a thing again. For a while it felt like every other post on the tech/nerd blogs was absolutely gushing about something LEGO-related, which was super annoying. I just couldn’t get away from it.

“OMG check out this life-size X-Wing Fighter made with LEGOs!”

No.

“Here’s an awesome [insert 80s pop culture icon here] made ENTIRELY of LEGOs!”

So?

“Visit LEGO Land and relive your childhood dreams! SO COOL!”

Fuck off.

This is all coming from supposedly adult men, mind you. It got so bad that I had to actually stop reading some of my favorite blogs for a few months. LEGO news is kind of like Trump news: with some strategic filtering you can manage to get through at least a few hours a day without being reminded that it’s still a thing.

Around the same time that I noticed LEGO’s stranglehold on the tech/nerd blogs, the soul-crushingly mediocre Transformers movies began to steadily plop from Michael Bay’s movie-hole (actually that first one wasn’t so bad), with more blatant assaults on our childhoods to follow. I’m looking at you, Smurfs.

It’s not all crap, though. The show “Stranger Things” is a pretty good example. It’s custom-tailored to the 80s kid: the music, the cast, the sets, the story, and even the opening titles are all carefully crafted to extract as much memory juice as possible from those of us who watched a lot of Lucas and Spielberg movies as teenagers. People went apeshit over this show — it’s a love letter to a genre of films we grew up with, and for the most part it’s done right. But while watching it, I often felt very conscious of the lengths they went to in order to tug on those memory-strings. They seemed to be saying, “Hey look, remember this toy? And D&D? And Star Wars? And this song playing in the video arcade?? Remember????” Yeah, yeah, yeah…we remember. We were, like, there and stuff.

The success of “Stranger Things” and LEGO stuff has been a blinding bat-signal to advertisers that they need to double down and cash in on this shit right now. So now we have more (and lesser-quality) LEGO movies, an attempted TRON reboot, a Trolls movie, new Voltron cartoons, that vomit-inducing “Pixels” movie, a Castlevania show, a mini Super Nintendo console, a Dark Crystal show in the works, toys of every 80s pop culture movie/T.V. character you can imagine…on and on. And this recent movie “Ready Player One”, which brings nostalgia-pandering to a new level. It references 200+ pop culture characters/things from the past 30 years just so the audience will oohhh and ahhhh in recognition. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually….and I’ll probably do some of my own oohhh-ing and ahhhh-ing despite myself. Damn you, Hollywood, and your pinpoint-accurate targeting of my feelgood memory spots!

Don’t get me wrong, I looooove trawling through my 80s memories (and what I remember of my 70s childhood) and I indulge in them quite a bit. One of my favorite things to do is take mushrooms and listen to music from my Jr. High and High School years. On vinyl. Records I played to death as a teenager that I’ve carried around for 30 years, which still sound great. God, it’s fun… I also have a deep obsession with retro gaming emulators and a weakness for chiptunes and blippy videogame music. There’s a lot more than that, but I like to indulge my nostalgia on my own terms; hearing an 80’s song in a movie or T.V. show used to be a fun throwback moment, but now it happens so often and so deliberately, it just feels lazy. “Oh look, they’re playing the song ‘I Ran’ while this guy is…running away. Wow, such a clever and totally not obvious thing to do…”

Eventually I began to wonder why we’re wallowing in nostalgia so much. We’re gladly eating up all the mass-marketed references, but why? And is it healthy? Every generation has its share of “I remember when…” but mine seems to be taking it to a weirder and more obsessive level. A personal example: I know a gay couple in their 40s who dressed up in Star Wars pajamas and built a scale-model Death Star from LEGOs on Christmas morning last year. They posted photos of it on Facebook, even. Is that taking things a bit too far? I don’t know. Maybe this is how some people reconnect to their younger selves. Or maybe this is how some people cope with living in the darker, scarier America that 2016 brought us. Or maybe we just have too much damn time on our hands. Hard to tell.

 

Disney Déjà Vu

I’ve been meaning to write and post this for months, but America’s steady transformation into a right-wing hellscape led by a hateful troglodyte and his band of loathsome swamp trash has been somewhat distracting.  More on that later, I’m sure. 😀  Anyway…

Heihei: the true star of the film.

I really enjoyed “Moana.”  Colorful characters, excellent songs, amazing visuals (I’ve never seen CGI water look that good).  The story is compelling, but even from the first act it began to feel familiar.  I found myself predicting events and plotlines, probably to my husband’s annoyance.  “The grandma knows a secret, and of course she’s eccentric and/or crazy.”  “I bet her father lost someone at sea and that’s why he has issues with going beyond the reef.”  “The grandma’s gonna die and Moana will freak out and run.”  “There’s gotta be a small animal sidekick – all these movies have one.”  “Moana and Maui are gonna have a falling out and go separate ways, then they’ll make up before the final battle – that always happens.”  And sure enough, all that stuff happened…because I’ve seen this movie before.  Only it wasn’t called “Moana” – it was called “The Lion King.”

I tend to notice trends and patterns in pop culture and advertising, so at some point I began to do some reading about The Hero’s Journey, which is – as Wikipedia broadly puts it – “the common template of a broad category of tales that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, and in a decisive crisis wins a victory, and then comes home changed or transformed.”  There’s a lot more to it than that, but it’s something that tends to resonate with people on some universal level.  George Lucas famously used it for “Star Wars”, for example.  Naturally, once Hollywood caught on to this recipe for storytelling, screenwriters have used it as a template for zillions of movies over the past 20-30 years…which is one reason why so many movies these days have a familiar, predictable feeling.  I can’t decide if it’s lazy storytelling or just a formula that truly appeals to people.  Maybe a bit of both?

The Hero’s Journey can be fairly complicated, but various writers over the years have condensed it into a series of general stages.  Once you get a feel for them, you start seeing it being used quite a lot.  I’ve noticed it in many Disney & Pixar movies, though they’re hardly the only ones.  “Moana” is the latest one I’ve seen, so I thought it would be fun to compare it with “The Lion King” since that’s the movie I kept thinking of while watching.  They both seem to be built around this narrative which makes them so predictable.  It’s not a perfect comparison in every way, but you can see the similarities.

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1. THE ORDINARY WORLD. The hero, uneasy, uncomfortable or unaware, is introduced sympathetically so the audience can identify with the situation or dilemma. The hero is shown against a background of environment, heredity, and personal history. Some kind of polarity in the hero’s life is pulling in different directions and causing stress.

• Moana:  All Moana wants is to travel beyond the reef and explore the outside world, but noooooo.  Her father scares her with stories of monsters and death out there, and basically bullies her into giving up her dreams and taking her intended role as the village Chief.  Bummer.
• The Lion King:  King Mufasa tells his son Simba to stay away from the scary elephant graveyard.  He also tells him that he’ll be king someday, whether he wants it or not.  Simba isn’t impressed.

2. THE CALL TO ADVENTURE. Something shakes up the situation, either from external pressures or from something rising up from deep within, so the hero must face the beginnings of change.

• Moana:  Oh shit!  The fish and island vegetation are dying and things are starting to suck.  Even the coconuts are turning crappy – and they have lots of coconuts.
• The Lion King:  Mufasa gets killed and Scar tricks Simba into thinking it’s his fault, so he wigs out and runs away across the desert.

3. REFUSAL OF THE CALL. The hero feels the fear of the unknown and tries to turn away from the adventure, however briefly. Alternately, another character may express the uncertainty and danger ahead.

• Moana:  Still, her father says “No way!” when she says they need to forage beyond the reef, so she gives up the idea of ever leaving the island.  Turns out he lost his friend to the sea when they were kids (I knew it!), so go figure.  She ventures out to the reef anyway and almost gets killed.  Whoops.
• The Lion King:  Simba and Nala go to the elephant graveyard and almost get killed by a trio of asshole hyenas (which is redundant, I suppose).

4. MEETING WITH THE MENTOR. The hero comes across a seasoned traveler of the worlds who gives him or her training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey. Or the hero reaches within to a source of courage and wisdom.

• Moana:  Hey look, it’s the crazy/eccentric grandma who conveniently happens to know allllll the secrets of the village’s past!  She shows Moana that her ancestors were sea explorers, then tells her to get the hell off that island…and then she promptly croaks.  The phrase “remember who/where/what you are” makes its first of many appearances.
• The Lion King:  This happens later in the story – see #9.

5. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD. At the end of Act One, the hero commits to leaving the Ordinary World and entering a new region or condition with unfamiliar rules and values.

• Moana:  Moana bursts into song, grabs one of her ancestors’ old boats, and speeds out beyond he reef.  Her boat gets trashed in a storm and she finds herself stuck on a small island with the demigod Maui.  Whoops.
• The Lion King:  Simba flees across the desert and almost bites it.  He befriends a smartass meerkat and a farting warthog who teach him to eat bugs.  Their philosophy is “hakuna matata”, which apparently is Swahili for “I don’t give two shits about anything important.”  He grows up to be a lazy, ambivalent brat.

6. TESTS, ALLIES AND ENEMIES. The hero is tested and sorts out allegiances in the Special World.

• Moana:  She and Maui bicker and fight.  A lot.  But eventually they decide they need each others’ help.
• The Lion King:  Simba’s childhood friend Nala finds him and tells him he needs to reclaim his throne from that pompous twat Scar.  Simba says, “Oh hell no!  That’s none of my business.  But hey, you’re kinda hot now.  Wanna roll around in the jungle?”

7. APPROACH. The hero and newfound allies prepare for the major challenge in the Special world.

• Moana:  They head out to sea in search of Maui’s magic hook thing.  Together they defeat a few enemies like freaky pirate coconuts and a giant crab with an addiction to bling.

8. THE ORDEAL. Near the middle of the story, the hero enters a central space in the Special World and confronts death or faces his or her greatest fear. Out of the moment of death comes a new life.

• Moana:  Finally they’re ready to return the Heart of the Sea (a magic rock) to where it belongs and defeat the evil darkness thing.  Maui gets his ass beaten by a lava demon, quits the quest, and takes off feeling like a total loser.  Moana gives up her quest, also feeling like a total loser.  Like, such a bummer.
• The Lion King:  Simba’s being super whiny and feeling guilty about his dead father.  He refuses to return home and save the day.  Nala leaves instead, unimpressed.

9. THE REWARD. The hero takes possession of the treasure won by facing death. There may be celebration, but there is also danger of losing the treasure again.

• Moana:  Her crazy grandma’s ghost appears and reminds her of her destiny and stuff.  She says “Remember who you are!” for what must be the 12^th time in the movie.  Moana is probably tired of hearing that, so she…remembers who she is.
• The Lion King:  The crazy monkey shaman Rafiki finds Simba and, in a fun Cher moment, whacks him on the head to snap him out of it.  He then mystically reveals to Simba his destiny as King.  “Remember who you are!” and whatnot.

10. THE ROAD BACK. About three-fourths of the way through the story, the hero is driven to complete the adventure, leaving the Special World to be sure the treasure is brought home. Often a chase scene signals the urgency and danger of the mission.

• Moana:  She takes the Heart and decides to do everything her own damn self.  You go, girl.
• The Lion King:  Simba finally grows a pair and decides to go back home to kick some Scar ass.

11. THE RESURRECTION. At the climax, the hero is severely tested once more on the threshold of home. He or she is purified by a last sacrifice, another moment of death and rebirth, but on a higher and more complete level. By the hero’s action, the polarities that were in conflict at the beginning are finally resolved.

• Moana:  She attempts to return the Heart despite all the danger, and Maui comes back to help.  She returns the Heart to the goddess, who is then restored to sanity and the darkness retreats.
• The Lion King:  Simba beats the shit out of Scar and the hyenas, who in turn rip Scar to shreds.

12. RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR. The hero returns home or continues the journey, bearing some element of the treasure that has the power to transform the world as the hero has been transformed.

• Moana: She goes back home where everything is thriving again.  She becomes Chief (again) and continues the island’s long line of Chiefs.
• The Lion King:  Simba assumes his role as King and brings his kingdom back to its former glory.  He and Nala get busy and produce a cub, continuing that Circle of Life thing.

Side note:  I just saw “Wonder Woman” and had similar feelings about it afterwards.  Loved the movie, but it still had that familiar structure.  And come to think of it, “Frozen” probably had the same exact same thing but I refuse to watch it again to find out…

“You made me hate my guts last night.”

I haven’t looked in my Spam folder in ages,  and the other day I needed to find a password-reset email that went in there.  Besides the usual “Make ur dick So harddd!1!!1” crapola, I was highly amused to see these ridiculous emails accusing me of something.  It’s such an obvious attempt to get a response, but I’m sure some idiot(s) out there replied to them and opened the floodgates to a shitload more spam or worse.  These are hilariously transparent and pathetic, so I thought it would be fun to share them with some responses.

Subject: Get the hell out of my life – F U
From: “Rebecca\ E.J” <Amy@cbbp.erasmunipod.com>
Date: Sun, 07 May 2017 13:15:27 -0400 (EDT)

Hi ________,

I just wanna tell you that you suck. I will never forgive you for what you did to me, you piece of crap. ASSHOLE! Do not you dare to talk to me again. Believe me, you don’t wanna see my other side, ask your goddamn sister, she has seen it.

F U,
T.B

Yeah, well my slag of a sister knows your dirty secret.  You know, the one about the goat.  Yeah, that one.  And I’m tellin’ everybody on Facebook!  Oh wait, I don’t have a sister.  Nevermind.

Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 04:43:49 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Cut the cr*p and stop stalking me
From: “Vanessa E.J” <reply@economicslearn.com>

Hey Scumbag,
Stop stalking me and my friend or I will report you. You piece of shit, cock-sucker douche. I do not know why you are doing this! You slept together once, only once. It does not mean anything. Have not you heard of hook up?
So, f*** off and leave us alone

I slept together?  What the fuck does that even mean?  Get your story straight, asshole.  I don’t have time for this mealy-mouthed nonsense, I have to get back to stalking you.  Whoever you are.

From: Inbox Message <hello@lookient.com>
Subject: About Last Night Dick
Date: Tue, 09 May 2017 14:28:43 -0400 (EDT)

You mad bitch! You made me hate my guts last night. You are an ASS. You disgust me. It makes me wanna puke when I think of you. YOU SON OF BITCH. Do not you dare to do that to me again, sucker.

Oh you deserve every bit of whatever it was you got last night!  You know why.  And I’ll do it to you again any time I want…as soon as I figure out who and where you are and whatever it was I did that pissed you off so much.

This one’s a little different, but no less ridiculous:

From: Brittney <reply@wattapelmicro.com>
Subject: why aren’t you answering me ?
Date: Fri, 5 May 2017 12:05:52 -0400

Its been a while since the last time we talked, a longer time since we saw eachother
Some say time fixes everyting but honestly its not working out for me Today I miss you more than ever
I guess I should’ve told you that when I could, now it might be a little to late
I guess you’ll never understand how much you mean to me even though I told you a million times
Hurtss to know forever ended so soon.

Oh Brittney, Brittney, Brittney.  You should have known it was just gonna be a quickie in the back of that U-Haul trailer, nothing more.  It would never have worked out anyway, with my uncontrollable gayness and you having a vagina and all.  Farewell, my love…whoever you are/were.  We shan’t meet again…

Betrayed by President Cheeto

Extremities are to scale.

This probably makes me a bit of an asshole, but when I read about Trump supporters who are now feeling fucked over, I get the giggles.  This guy’s troubles really aren’t funny, of course, but I do feel more than a little bit of schadenfreude reading about the extraordinary lengths he went to in supporting the Orange One.

‘Trump Troubadour,’ who attended 45 Trump rallies to honor his late son, feels ‘betrayed’ because of health care

Beginning in January 2016, Kraig Moss traveled to 45 rallies, belting out songs in support of Donald Trump and telling the story of his late son, Rob, who died three years ago from a heroin overdose.

Wow.  A little extreme, but he really believed in Trump’s promise to “help young people”, whatever that means, and there’s nothing wrong with following your passion.

…He stopped making his mortgage payments and sold the equipment for his construction business to stay on the campaign trail, galvanized by Trump’s promise to help young people — like Moss’s late son — who struggle with drug addiction.

Holy shit.  This guy really had it bad for our future Puppet-in-Chief.  Most were content to just wear one of those stupid red hats and wave an American flag while shouting at brown people.

Trump made this promise to Moss personally at a rally in Iowa in January 2016. Speaking through a microphone to the crowd, he addressed Moss directly: “The biggest thing we can do in honor of your son … we have to be able to stop it.”

Wow, that’s awesome!  Trump really cares.  It’s not like he’s just saying this stuff to get votes.  I mean, that would make him a lying, pussy-grabbing sack of badly-coiffed shit, right?

But about two weeks ago, Moss caught his first glimpse of the Republican proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act. The proposed health care bill … would eliminate a requirement that Medicaid cover basic mental-health and addiction services in states that expanded it, a mandate that covered nearly 1.3 million people.  “This bill is just the absolute opposite,” Moss told The Washington Post. “I felt betrayed. I felt let down.”

Whoops.  Sold his business and lost his house, all in order to follow a third-rate Hitler cosplay enthusiast around the country singing songs about his greatness.  Now, like so many others, he’s finding out that he was being conned on an epic level.  Awww.

Moss said he initially supported many of Trump’s other promises as well, such as his pledge to build a border wall with Mexico. But lately he has been upset hearing the stories of families being separated by deportations.

Oh really?  What did you think would happen when you hand the highest office in the nation to a cheese-colored bag of jingoist raccoon farts?  Christ on a cracker!  Too bad about his son, but I have zero sympathy for people like this who blindly supported a widely-known con artist and big-business bullshitter.  The only good thing to come of his election so far is the vast amount of epithets invented to describe him as anything other than “President Trump.”

So to you disillusioned Trumpites, all I can say is:  boo-fuckin’-hoo.  Now you’re paying the price with the rest of us.  Enjoy!

80’s Therapy

Listening to music from my childhood and teenage years has not only fed my hunger for nostalgia — it’s also helped me cope with the terrifying reality of our new authoritarian nightmare.  We all have to do what we can to stay sane, right?

I grew up in a small Arizona town which was surrounded by radio stations that played nothing but country music, and as a teenager in the 80’s it didn’t appeal to me at all.  I had to settle for buying the occasional tape or record from the Flagstaff Mall which was an hour away (which seemed like days away at the time).  This was before the internet and file-sharing, so I usually discovered music via friends at school or on MTV.  Yes, they used to play music videos.  Shocking, I know.

I can’t even begin to imagine how many of these I filled up with radio recordings and homespun mixes.  Truly, I am an old fart.

One day I discovered that our local TV cable company carried FM stations, and by touching the CAT5 cable directly to my radio antenna, I could magically pick up all the stations in Phoenix!  It opened up a whole new world of music for me, and I discovered a lot of music that helped shape my tastes as an adult.  So when I hear songs from the 80’s today, it brings back a lot of great memories of that time of discovery, when I’d listen to the radio constantly and record songs on cassette to enjoy many times later.

It’s not necessarily the “good” songs that do this to me.  Even when I hear a shitty 80’s song, I’m transported back to my teens just by that 80’s sound.  You know it when you hear it:  the way the synths sounded, the cheesy and (mostly) programmed drums, the weird sustain effect they put on the vocals for that “stadium” effect…I love all that stuff, even if the song is a turd.  And that decade produced a lot of shitty music, let me tell you.  (This sound has made a comeback in the past 10-15 years, but most bands trying to emulate it can’t quite get it right.  I can always tell a legit 80’s band from a group of poseur millennials trying to replicate the “oldies.”)

So, as you can imagine, I was soooooper excited to find this astonishing collection of 80’s DJ mixtapes, lovingly curated by a guy who created the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society.  This was recently profiled on the SFist blog and it’s a fascinating read:

The art of the club mix — equal parts curation, imagination, and rhythmic skill — is something that’s evolved over the decades in different ways in different cities, with DJs finding influences both locally and internationally. But before the explosion of file-sharing in the early 2000s and the widespread accessibility of digitized music a few years later, DJ sets were things you only ever experienced live in the nightclubs themselves, unless your friend was a DJ and copied a cassette for you — or unless that DJ was famous enough to have a record label and a few CDs.

Hopkins wants people who went to SF nightclubs like Pleasuredome, the I-Beam, and the EndUp back in the day to be able to hear some of these multi-hour mixes that they may only have the haziest memories of, and he wants to introduce a new generation of DJs and nightlife mavens to the talents of their forebears.

Some of these mixes were on cassette tapes, but others were recorded on big reels which go for 2-3 hours, recorded directly from the soundboard.  He even went through the trouble of scanning the actual tapes and reels so you can see the DJs’ scribbling on them.  This extra level of detail proves how serious he is about it.  I’m a serial archivist and I totally get off on collecting and curating hoards of different media (music, ebooks, digital comics, photos, retro games), and including the scans is exactly how I would have done it.  I tip my Pac-Man hat to you, sir! 😀

There are many hours of music available to play and/or download.  Some the mixes I love, others not so much, but it all depends on your tastes and what was hot at the time.  I’ve been playing these while I work since they make surprisingly good background music, and every so often a song comes on that just lights up my face with nerdy delight.  Stuff I haven’t heard in what seems like a thousand years.

So go explore it if 80’s music is your thang!  He also has a collection of 90’s stuff which I’ll have to dive into later.  One decade at a time…