Of Mixtapes and Misspent Youth

I thought the answering machine phenomenon was bad enough, but now I’ve decided that there is nothing more cringe-inducing than hearing your own prepubescent voice belt out the lyrics to “Eurotrash Girl.”

 

Last week I was at my parents’ house for dinner and, having decided to rummage around in my old bedroom closet, found a goldmine that has since hitched a ride back to my apartment and taken its rightful place as the life of the studio-sized party. I’m talking about a shoebox full of my old cassette tapes. Eureka! Finding this box is like unearthing a portal directly back to grade school, a sensation not unlike running into a former classmate at a happy hour and drunkenly reminiscing about that one time we both got kicked out of math class for passing notes. It’s like finding the magic genie of fame and being transported in the reverse, from Tom Hanks size back to wide-eyed youth. When I first cracked the lid and popped in a few of these tapes, I found myself periodically looking at my DVD collection and catching sight of a movie like or to prove that it was still, in fact, present-day and not 1993.

There’s a funny order to the shoebox, in that all of the tapes fall into one of several categories that all remind me of being little and awkward. There are the piano tapes, a collection of yellow cassettes that my piano teacher utilized to record every song I learned, plus a few that I made myself on the home boombox (although hers were better, since she introduced every song with the date and title, whereas I hated the sound of my own voice too much to do the same at home). There are the mixtapes, the handwriting and choice of songs denoting which year of elementary school the mix came from (my favorite is the one where I found it perfectly normal to include both Tool and Michael Bolton—fourth grade, without a doubt). Then there are the full-length albums, which could potentially be subcategorized into store-bought and dubbed (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s Music for the People alongside Pink Floyd’s The Wall qualify for the former, while Def Leppard’s Hysteria and the black Metallica album make up the latter, in my sister’s all-caps scrawl).

But the greatest category hands down, and the one that embodies the preteen era like none other, is the dubbed-from-radio mixtape. These held a treasure chest of surprises for me, and not just because they were full of songs I wouldn’t have remembered due to their failure to make the cut into my album collection (hence the need to pirate them from the airwaves). No, the fact that these tapes were all unmarked and that I had no idea what song might pop on next weren’t the things that captivated me. Instead it was the strange mix of horror and satisfaction that welled within me when I heard the last of Porno for Pyros’ “Pets,” flipped the tape to see what else I’d lifted from the radio, and found an entire B-side devoted to my sister and me singing karaoke to radio songs. Oh, yes. In addition to the “dub” function, we had also apparently found the “record” button and had chosen to improve upon the dub-from-radio idea by singing along. I thought the answering machine phenomenon was bad enough, but now I’ve decided that there is nothing more cringe-inducing than hearing your own prepubescent voice belt out the lyrics to “Eurotrash Girl.”

But the tape is still worth listening to, as a simple testament to what it means to be a fly on the wall, and by that I mean that there are songs on here where we think we know the lyrics but don’t, and what follows is a window on our adolescent world. We forget that the tape is running, and we just start blabbering to each other. Case in point, Pearl Jam’s “Crazy Mary”—we know the chorus, but once that’s over, our singing devolves into a litany of screaming over who each of us has a crush on, then the screaming gives way to muffled scuffling and choking noises. Then the tape is promptly shut off, although by whom I don’t really know (though I have a feeling it was my mom, since we were yelling pretty loudly). But the tape doesn’t end there. No, it goes on for quite awhile and ends on Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today,” probably the funniest song on the entire tape because we don’t even make it to the lyrics before one of us starts yelling, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” and the tape goes dead. Now, I imagine that this is the point where singing along started to get old and we turned off the stereo to go play some Donkey Kong. Or else we just really hated Billy Corgan—although I find this hard to believe considering the time my sister made me continuously call The Point and request “Disarm,” assuming a different voice each time, so we could record it when it was finally played. On my fifth impersonation, the DJ yelled at me and hung up.

Of course, listening to these tapes immediately shrinks me back down to the awkward kid I was, with braces and terrible hair. But at this point, who cares? Certainly not my sister, who I think laughed as hard as I did when I called her and told her about my golden find. Now we just need to find her box of tapes.