I have been listening to Spotify for over six months now, paid a subscription to skip the damn ads. I love that I can search any track from my own memory and being able to track down that elusive obscure song and hear it again. Nostalgia high right there.
The way I experience music is that it is a soundtrack of my memories. Specific hits on continuous airplay for say the summer of 1978 creates an imprint for me. When something significant was happening to me that summer I can get a montage of those memories just by hearing a song from that period.
Unfortunately sometimes a song becomes too much of a crowd pleaser and so it never really goes away. For me that song is True by Spandau Ballet. It was my favourite tune of my favourite band at the time. So now if I want a hit of nostalgia from that song, the montage now includes the other times over the decades when that song was playing too.
My earliest musical memories are of The Beatles and Petula Clark. I later realised that I must have heard it over the radio which was very popular and available to more consumers as transistor technology superseded vacuum tube technology making them more affordable and portable.
There was also the vinyl record player. I remember we had a 'portable record player' which meant that it could be easily relocated or brought along to a friend's house to 'play records'. Records that one buys because, one likes to be able to hear that song on demand because some day the radio will cease playing that track in favour of newer and trendier music.
About 1974, my dad bought a Radio Cassette player. Earliest albums I can remember are obviously my dad's cassette collection: Lobo, John Denver, and The Carpenters {kill, fuck, marry). But obviously I was still using it as a radio to tune in to favourite stations and hear more of that sweet sweet soundtrack that everyone else seems to like too, more or less. Also I was at the mercy of grown ups to decide if they like what I tuned the dial to. So aside from the musical tastes of the grown ups around me, I am also exposed ro what I stumble into in the city or on public transport (jeepney drivers loved :Led Zeppellin and Black Sabbath). The first time I heard Chinese music was while walking past a house in Tondo..
Then I discovered that the Radio Cassette could also record voices. The first time we played back and heard everyone's recorded voices we laughed, until one hears one's own voice and realise that was what everyone else hears when one speaks. And it could also record what was playing on the radio.
So how did I make mix tapes? I didn't even know they were mix tapes when I was making them. Start with a blank cassette loaded and hit record + play together, then hit pause just when you think the recording head has spooled past the clear tape header. Then listen to the radio and wait for that track, when it comes on, hit un-pause to resume recording. Sometimes the announcer talks over the track and that's annoying, maybe I just rewind and re-record over it hoping for a better recording next try. Sometimes I would get two songs that I liked cross-faded into each other by the DJ and that is sweet. Sometimes DJ just chops the ending of the song. Aaaaghhh!
In my teens my dad bought a Panasonic stereo with high fidelity speakers, AM/FM/MW radio, a cassette deck, a turntable, and the sweetener, a headphone jack and matching headphones. It had comfortable soft ear seals and it looked the part of a serious audiophile. My dad started collecting some vinyl as well as cassette albums now.
I remember taking a pocket transistor radio with earphone to school once. Just so I can listen to music on radio. A few years later, the trendy kids at my high school started showing off their new Sony Walkman. I thought how brilliant is that? I was the chump that brought monaural earphones.
I realised they had a point. Listening on the Panasonic headphones in stereo was an interesting discovery of acoustics and sound engineering. By this time I could scrape up enough savings to buy my own music in cassette or LP every month or so. I didn't think 45rpm singles were a worthy investment. Cassettes were cheaper but at the time I didn't have the means to record cassette to cassette, so I bought LPs that I can then record on to cassette, The cassette that I can listen to in the car or on my Walkman.
After moving to Australia, we had no money to buy music, so we borrowed music from the public library and recording it using a dual tape deck to keep a copy.
First cassettes.
Then ripping CDs.
Then Napster and briefly Limewire.
Then iTunes and the iPod,
When I listen to Spotify, sometimes it plays me a track I had forgotten I liked. And that's my instant unpolluted flashback heaven,
