ThisNext Blog

Dear Sony WM-FX281 Cassette Walkman,

Though it sometimes seems that the world is trying to tear us apart, my heart forever remains true to you. All banged-up and tired, with those tiny cracks near your battery door and the long-faded letters on your every button, you’re not nearly so pretty as all those shiny new iPods everyone and their mom (okay, even my mom) keep trying to push my way. Your “play” button fell off over a year ago, and I’ve had to buy at least two replacement headphone sets, the current pair some big-ass Radio Shack things that I have to wear tilted toward the back of my head, lest I look very much like a Martian or Star Trek cast member. Oh, and all that rewinding and fast-forwarding when I want to skip through a song? Not so super-awesome.

Still, my love for you will never die. Surviving the purchase of so many batteries (about which there’s a little bit of eco-guilt building up, I must confess) and relentless teasing from my friends and siblings, my devotion to your tapey ways has proven endless. And that’s not just due to my sorta-secret phobias of technological advancement of any kind, or to my predilection for near-drowning myself in nostalgia whenever granted the opportunity. I love you because you make my ears happy with your strong and loud sound, and because of that which you hold inside your creaky, clumsy insides: nothing but mixtapes.

Because even though - in my portable-audio life, at least - I remain stuck on cassettes, I’m not quite crazy enough to actually continuing purchasing music on tape (which generally isn’t possibly anyway, unless we’re talking about thriftstores and really special record shops). No, all the music I feed you was born on 90-minute Maxwell blanks, most of which have now been taped and re-taped over at least a dozen times at this point. They’re impressively durable things, giving me Girl Talk now where there might have been Jenny Lewis or Animal Collective year ago.

The mix I’m playing most at the moment includes some Desire-era Bob Dylan, a few Paul McCartney songs from Ram, a little bit of Wings , The Beatles, and “Then She Did” off of Ritual de lo Habitual by Jane’s Addiction. Which may sound slightly incongruous, but it totally works for taking big long walks around Venice Beach near dusk (one of my favorite things to do lately).

But if someone’s been keeping track of the songs played most by you over the years, I’ve got a feeling the number-one artist would be Red Hot Chili Peppers. You weren’t around when I first discovered my favorite band, but it was some other member of your very family, whichever model Sony might have been hawking around 1989. I almost wrote this letter to my favorite Chili Peppers record (Blood Sugar Sex Magik) instead, but then I remembered: There is no them without you.

Hearts 4-eva,
Liz