The Burnzo Diaries: April 2026

I don’t know if this was the same experience for everyone, but I feel like, back in the late-1980s and early-1990s, it was more often that I found myself buying a cassette single than a full album.

Cassette singles featured the hot single (i.e. hit song) of a certain musical artist or band. Usually, SIDE A had the hot single and SIDE B had some not-so-popular song by the band. Some singles, however, had the same hot single on both sides of the tape and other cassette singles, to their credit, had two great songs on both sides. For example, Guns N’ Roses put out a cassette single for their song “Patience,” which was on SIDE A, but SIDE B had “Rocket Queen.” At the time, I had bought the single because I liked “Patience,” but I quickly grew to like “Rocket Queen” better, so I basically would listen to “Rocket Queen,” rewind, listen to “Rocket Queen,” rewind, and listen to “Rocket Queen.” At a certain point, I wished they had just put “Rocket Queen” on both SIDE A and B so I wouldn’t have to do so much rewinding.

The GNR "Rocket Queen" cassette single. One of my favorites.

I was born in 1982, so I was only about 6-8 years old in the late-1980s. I didn’t know too much about music during this time, but there were a few songs I really liked on the radio, so I was usually only interested in cassette singles since the singles were cheaper and also mostly contained just my favorite songs on them.

I usually bought these cassette singles at a record store called “Record Town” in the Walpole Mall, also known as “The Mall at Walpole,” located in—that’s right—Walpole, Massachusetts. In the 1980s, this record store was actually called “Good Vibrations,” but around the 1990 area, its name changed to Record Town, which was a record store franchise, usually located within shopping malls.

A photo of a Record Town I found on the Internet. This is pretty close
to how the Walpole Mall's Record Town looked in the early-1990's.

I vividly remember that there was an entire wall when you first walked into Record Town, on the right, lined with cassette single tapes. Full album cassette tapes were located in the center of the store, all alphabetized and also organized into genres, like rap, rock and metal. I remember the full album cassettes were “locked into” those rectangular plastic anti-theft holders that made the tapes too bulky for thieves to stuff into their pockets. I think these plastic holders or hangers—whatever they were called—had to be removed by the Record Town clerk upon purchasing the cassette.

The cassette singles, however, weren’t locked into these plastic anti-theft devices. They were just wrapped in cellophane plastic, probably because they were much cheaper than the full albums and the store wasn’t as concerned about these being shoplifted.

Aside from the aforementioned GNR single I had, other notable cassette singles that I remember purchasing, usually at Record Town (many of which I still have today), were Alice Cooper’s “Poison” (SIDE B had his song “Trash”), Motley Crüe’s “Dr. Feelgood” (SIDE B had their song “Sticky Sweet”), Bon Jovi’s “Lay Your Hands on Me” (SIDE B had a great live version of “Runaway”) and Poison’s “Your Mama Don’t Dance” (SIDE B had their song “Look What the Cat Dragged in”).

With a couple of exceptions, most of the tapes in this photo are cassette singles, all of which I still have to this very day.

One other notable cassette single I had (and still have) was the song “Turtle Power” by Partners in Kryme. If you’re not in the know like I am, this was the hot rap single from the 1990 live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The single also featured a couple other songs/musical themes from the movie, but they were not as good. “Turtle Power” was the only reason I owned this single and the only reason I listened to it. However, to be completely accurate here, I don’t think I purchased this single. I believe it may have been borrowed from a friend and never returned (sorry about that, [unknown friend], if you’re reading this).

My "Turtle Power" cassette single.

I don’t think it was until 1989 or maybe even 1990 that I owned an actual full album cassette. Of course, I had borrowed many full album cassettes from my older brother of five years, but I usually didn’t like listening to these because there were too many songs I didn’t recognize and didn’t like on them. I usually just found myself fast-forwarding or rewinding to the songs I had heard on the radio or seen as videos on MTV, hence why I preferred cassette singles. However, for Christmas in, I think, 1989, I got my first full album cassette. And that was Skid Row’s self-titled album Skid Row.

I don’t know why I suddenly found myself wanting the full Skid Row album. At the time, I think I only knew one song by them, the song whose video I saw on MTV all the time: “18 and Life.” Why didn’t I just get the single? No idea. Maybe I felt like I had matured to the point of needing the full album. Or maybe I liked Skid Row so much that I figured I would like any and every one of their songs. Either way, I know I got the Skid Row album for Christmas around 1989, so I can confidently say that my first cassette album was Skid Row’s Skid Row, which is definitely a good album to have on my resume as a first full album cassette. This cassette was, by the way, much better than the second full album cassette that I owned, but I will get to this second cassette in a moment.

Skid Row's "18 and Life" music video

There was something different about actually owning my own full album cassette. I suddenly no longer found myself fast-forwarding and rewinding to just the songs I knew from MTV or the radio. I felt I was too “invested” to just skip over the lesser-known songs (even though I technically got the tape for a Christmas gift and didn’t purchase it myself). I guess it was like I was squeezing out every last drop of what the tape had to offer me, getting my money’s worth. I suppose this is not an uncommon phenomenon, though. For instance, we are more likely to read a book in full that we bought at a bookstore but less likely to read the book in full if we borrowed it from the library where there is no vested interest. Same thing went for buying a cassette tape vs. borrowing it from somebody.

At first, a lot of the less-popular songs on the Skid Row tape wouldn’t do a whole lot for me, but the more I listened to the tape, the more the songs would grow on me. In hindsight, I wonder if I actually liked the songs or learned to like the songs. It’s a good question. Because some songs you just end up liking because you associate them with a pleasant memory; you know, they make you think about something fun you were doing at or around the time of you listening to this song. In this case, is the song actually good in and of itself, or is the memory that is attached to the song what is good?

Anyway, since Skid Row was the only cassette I owned and since I was so proud that it was a tape I could officially call my own, I pretty much listened to this tape on a loop. Oh, I should probably mention that for the same Christmas that I got this Skid Row tape I also got my very first Walkman. I’m trying to think of the brand right now, but I can’t quite remember. I know it wasn’t a Sony, but I also know it wasn’t a cheap no-name brand, either. I think it could have been Panasonic.

Getting a Walkman was a game-changer because I could secretly listen to “heavy” music without my parents knowing what I was even listening to. God love them, but they were clueless when it came to what kind of media I was consuming, whether it be TV, movies or, yes, music. I mean, they were the ones who gave me the Skid Row tape, completely oblivious to the fact that it was a rather grungy album. Then again, Skid Row’s lyrics were pretty much G-rated compared to some of the music the kids listen to these days. Popular mainstream music didn’t really turn all that inappropriate until gangsta rap in the 1990s (sorry, gangsta rap, but it’s true). Even today, in a world where we see and hear the most horrible things imaginable on the news or especially on social media platforms like “X” (formerly Twitter), I still clutch my pearls when I listen to Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle or Dr. Dre’s Chronic.

No, Skid Row wasn’t all that inappropriate, but it still would have sounded inappropriate if my parents actually listened to it (with all its distorted electric guitar, it frankly would have sounded to them like the devil’s music, in the same way my grandparents perceived Elvis Presley or the Beatles). This was why I liked listening to music on my Walkman: because I could listen free of parental judgment or especially free of censorship.

Listening to music on a Walkman also provided a more intimate listening experience. There was a big difference between listening to music on a Walkman with headphones and listening to music on a stereo or boombox. In the latter case, the music was of a world outside of yourself, but in the former case, the music was of a world inside of yourself. In other words, the Walkman transported me into a kind of fantasy world taking place in my head. I loved this and actually still love it today with the more modern technology. I very rarely listen to music on a device other than the modern-day equivalent of a Walkman, whether that be an iPod or smartphone. Even when I’m on my computer and nobody else is around to be bothered, I still prefer listening to music with headphones. I’m willing to bet that more dopamine gets released into the brain when listening to music in this more intimate, introspective manner. I wonder if studies have been done on this?

Getting back to the Skid Row tape, though, I listened to that cassette until I basically memorized each of the songs. However, my favorite songs continued to be the most popular ones: “18 and Life,” “Youth Gone Wild” and “I Remember You.” They must have manufactured that tape very well, because it stayed in great shape and I still have it to this very day. The quality of the sound barely even got muddy over the years. It’s still a favorite tape of mine today and a favorite album in general.

The Skid Row tape, still in great condition after 37 years.

About a year after getting the Skid Row tape, I bought another full album cassette and when I say “bought,” I really mean I bought it with my own money. This was not a Christmas present. So I guess this album was technically the first full album cassette I ever purchased with my own money. Regrettably, this album was not as badass as the Skid Row album and there were actually many years where I regretted owning this particular cassette. It wasn’t until very recently that I developed a greater appreciation for this album, especially many of its non-popular songs. The album I’m referring to is Vanilla Ice’s To the Extreme.

My Vanilla Ice To the Extreme tape is still in great condition today!

I of course bought this cassette because of the hit single “Ice Ice Baby.” However, because I owned the album and wanted to get my money’s worth, I forced myself to listen to all the other songs on the album, every single one of them. Just like with the Skid Row cassette, these songs didn’t do a whole lot for me at first but then grew on me and then I even began to like them. For a long time, I thought that I definitely just learnedto like these songs through repetition, but I recently revisited this album (yes, I still own the exact same tape, which is still in excellent condition) and realized that To the Extreme is actually a great album or at least much better than what I had thought about it for years. Vanilla Ice always got dismissed as a one-hit wonder, but many of his songs are surprisingly quite good. If you’re reading this now and want some proof, go listen to his songs “Ice is Workin’ It,” “Life is a Fantasy” and “Rasta Man,” just to list a few examples. But it would probably be better for you to listen to the entire album.

To the Extreme became another album I listened to on a loop; again, mainly because it was an album that I personally owned and spent my hard-earned allowance money on (actually, it was more likely my hard-earned First Communion money, as I never really had an allowance).

I did the same thing with the third full album cassette I ever personally owned: Aerosmith’s Get a Grip. I listened carefully to each and every song on this album, not because I necessarily thought it was a great album, but because I had invested in the album. In this particular case, I think I bought the album because it had the song “Cryin’” on it and I only liked “Cryin’” because of the song’s music video that featured the super-hot Alicia Silverstone. Remember how unbelievably HAWT she was in that video? I hope you aren’t offended by this, but she was SMOKIN in that video! Yes, seeing Alicia Silverstone in that Aerosmith video may have been what got me over my fear of girls and their cooties.

At a certain point, I became less interested in buying more cassette tapes and more interested in making my own. By “making my own” tapes, I, of course, mean that I started making mixtapes.

I can’t put a definite date on it, but I’m going to take an educated stab in the dark and say it was the year 1992 when I made my first mixtape. I was in the fourth grade and the tape I made mostly consisted of songs from Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion albums, such as “November Rain,” “Don’t You Cry” and “You Could be Mine,” but it also had Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (recently re-popularized by the 1992 Wayne’s World movie) and Kris Kross’ hit 1992 song “Jump.” Basically, what I did was borrow all of my brother’s tapes, dubbed the songs I liked from them onto a blank tape and then I had myself the ultimate mixtape, or at least in my eyes it was the ultimate mixtape. I amazingly still have this tape to this day (see pic below). The quality is not super-good because the tape I used was one of those low-noise “Amar”-brand blank tapes, a brand very similar to the better-known “Certron” tapes that I believe were about three-for-a-dollar and came in a bag (maybe at Radio Shack?) just as the tapes, sans cases.

The very first mixtape I ever made circa 1992.

These are the bags of "Certron" blank tapes that sold, usually for a dollar,
at places like Radio Shack or maybe Bradlees/Kmart.

At the time, my household had multiple double-tape-deck boomboxes perfect for making dubs or even high-speed dubs. Remember high-speed dubs? You could make mixtapes at about double the speed.

The more you made these mixtapes, the better you got at it. Novices would dub tapes without supervising the dubbing process, which would result in songs being cut off when you ran out of tape (sloppy!). Intermediate dubbers wouldn’t leave the dubbing process unsupervised, but they would maybe press the ‘stop’ button in between songs, which would result in a popping noise after every song (also sloppy!). Expert dubbers would press the ‘pause’ button instead of the ‘stop’ button between songs because this would prevent the popping noise; one song would play after the other in a seamless, fluid fashion. I eventually reached ‘expert’ status with my dubbing, but I will admit it took me a while to get there.

In fact, I don’t think I reached expert status with my dubbing until I was in college. It was the early 2000’s and I still listened to tapes quite a bit. Although CDs were the predominant music format in those days, cassettes were still the most convenient when it came to portable music. These were the days just before iPods had been invented. I did have one mp3 player called a “Rio,” but it only had enough memory to hold about six songs at one time, which was ridiculously impractical. I also had a Discman, but Discmen drained batteries mighty quickly, so those weren’t all that practical either. A basic Sony Walkman that played cassette tapes was still really the most practical way to listen to music on-the-go.

Of course, dubbing was a little different by the early-2000’s. Instead of dubbing from tape to tape, you usually dubbed from CD to tape. I remember going to my local library, borrowing a bunch of CDs and then going home and making one mixtape after another. I was big into ‘80s music, so most of these mixtapes would be of ‘80s pop music. But I also made punk mixtapes, Misfits and Ramones mixtapes, Van Halen mixtapes, Rush mixtapes—you name it. The quality of these tapes were quite good, both because I was dubbing from a high-quality CD and also because brands like Maxell had perfected the quality of their blank tapes by that stage in the game.

A Misfits mixtape I made when I was in college.

Before I get off the topic of mixtapes, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I also had a good deal of bootleg concert tapes that weren’t mixtapes per se but were recorded onto blank tapes. If you’re not familiar, these were tapes you would typically find at indie record stores and they were essentially unauthorized recordings of various bands’ live concerts. Oftentimes the quality of these concert recordings weren’t that great, but the ones I managed to find—especially of the Beastie Boys—were actually quite good. One time, I found one of these bootlegs at a random store in Hyannis, MA. while on vacation with my family on Cape Cod. However, most of the time, I found these bootlegs at a store called Mystery Train on the somewhat-famous Newbury Street in Boston. All throughout high school and college, I would take special trips to Newbury Street, usually with the specific purpose of going to three main stores: Newbury Comics, Tower Records and, yes, Mystery Train. Mystery Train, by the way, had a great deal of used cassette tapes of alltypes—not just bootlegs—and I bought many a used cassette there, although I think what set the store apart from other used record stores was, indeed, its vast inventory of bootleg concert tapes. I think I managed to get at least three awesome Beastie Boys bootleg tapes there, one of which I still have in my possession (see pic below).

This may in fact be a dub of a bootleg I got at
Mystery Train, not the original bootleg.

This is a Misfits concert bootleg I found at Mystery Train.

Newbury Comics, by the way, which was only a few doors down from Mystery Train, sold new tapes at cheap prices, although most people went there (at least in the mid-to-late-1990s) for their CDs. Tower Records, which was a few doors down from Newbury Comics, was sometimes a good place to get cassette tapes as well. I got the Beastie Boys’ Root Down EP there and I still have the receipt to prove it!

My 1995 Tower Records receipt for the Beastie Boys Root Down EP.

I listened to cassette tapes in a regular and non-ironic way (meaning I wasn’t trying to be a hipster) up until about the year 2007. This was the year when I got my first iPod, an iPod Nano 3^rd generation, to be exact. Once I got that iPod, I had absolutely no need for a Walkman or cassettes. Going from Walkman to iPod was like night and day. With a Walkman, not only did you have to carry around the bulky Walkman, but you also needed to carry all the tapes that you wanted to listen to, either on your person (like in your pockets) or in a bookbag or something. But with an iPod, you had this small, thin, slick square of aluminum that literally held hundreds of songs on it. We take something like that for granted now, but it was absolutely incredible at the time. I retired my Walkman and I didn’t look back for several years … for about 15 years, really.

The iPod Nano 3rd generation. One of the best iPod models, in my opinion.

Around the 2020 area, however, I suddenly found myself having an urge to listen to tapes … again. Part of the reason why I had this urge was because of COVID. The world had suddenly turned into a scary and, frankly, depressing place. I found myself longing for simpler times and “going analog” was one way to make me feel as though I was living back in a better time (that time mainly being the 1980s or the 1990s).

The other reason why I had the urge to listen to tapes again, I think, was because I was burnt out on digital music. After years of listening to nothing but mp3, YouTube, Pandora, Spotify etc., everything started to sound so flat, although I didn’t realize the extent to which everything sounded so flat until I actually listened to a cassette tape for the first time in about 15 years. When I did this, I realized how much deeper the sound quality was and by “deeper” I mean it almost sounds much more three-dimensional, as opposed to the highly-compressed and, thus, flat sound of a digital .mp3 file. Does that make sense? I guess I’m saying that sound on a cassette has more depth to it.

Of course, it helps (a lot) if you listen to said cassettes on a system that has good hardware with good clean tape heads. When I first got back into cassette in 2020, I had an old, portable, Panasonic tape player/recorder that I inherited from my grandfather a number of years ago. Although very portable, compact and convenient, the sound quality was not that great.

My Panasonic tape player being used as a makeshift car stereo.

I did still have my old Sony Walkman, the one I had been using in college, but the motor belt in it had apparently gotten brittle and likely broke, as the tape deck no longer worked. This was disappointing because it was a really good Walkman, complete with “mega-bass-booster.” I did try and see if I could replace the belt on it, but I couldn’t even get as far as unscrewing and opening the deck.

My brother, however, said he had an old Sony Walkman kicking around his apartment and he let me borrow it. This Walkman had good sound quality but unfortunately no bass-booster. The Walkman worked well for me for a while, but then it, too, stopped working and I think this was also because of the motor belt breaking. A broken motor belt, by the way, is the most likely reason why an older Walkman has stopped working. After a couple decades or more, the belt, which I believe is made out of rubber, becomes brittle and then either snaps or decomposes. Many fix-it-yourselfers know how to remove and replace these belts, but, like I said, I didn’t have much success when I tried doing this.

Finding myself Walkman-less all over again, I subsequently went on Amazon, tried to find a Sony Walkman on there but quickly learned that they didn’t make them anymore. As an alternative, I found a Walkman available on Amazon made by some Chinese company named “Dingmi” but was also … uh … Mexican (I think?). The model was called “The CR-318” at the time when I bought it, but if you look it up on Amazon now, the name has changed to “The Gracioso.” I saw it had gotten decent reviews and I thought to myself, at least at the time, that all Walkmen were pretty much the same, right?

Wrong.

The Walkman worked ok for a week or two, but then it started running slow, as though the batteries were running low (but they weren’t) and eventually the sound turned into pure static. I complained to the company, they said they were sorry and would send me a new one, free of charge, but the same thing quickly happened to the new one as well. Moral of the story: do not get some contemporary no-name-brand version of a Walkman on Amazon. They are not high-quality products; they are a far cry away from the finely-crafted, Japanese-made Walkmen of the 1980s and 1990s.

After doing some research, I learned that the wisest thing to do was to go on eBay and find a used Sony Walkman, one that was manufactured during the heyday of Walkmen but also one that was not too old because the older the model, the older the motor belt would be. I eventually found one that was in mint condition, barely used, and not too old of a model either. The seller was only asking for about $30, so I decided to take a chance and hit the “BUY NOW” button. This ended up being a very smart move. The Walkman came a few days later and worked perfectly. Since it was a newer Walkman model, it had great battery mileage; in fact, only one AA battery was required and the battery lasted quite a long time. If I had gotten an older model, the battery mileage wouldn’t have been as good. It’s kind of like buying a newer car vs. an older car. Newer cars get better gas mileage because of better fuel economy technology. Same thing with Walkmen. Walkmen of the late-1990s and early-2000s had better battery economy technology.

This is the Walkman I found on eBay and it works great!
Beautiful, isn't she?

Maybe about a year or so after getting the Sony Walkman off eBay, I decided to go back on eBay to see if there were any other Sony Walkmen that looked like they were in good shape and also reasonably priced. I did eventually find one early-2000’s sporty model that looked to be in decent shape. More importantly, the seller said that he had recently cleaned the Walkman’s tape heads and also replaced the motor belt. For only about $30, I thought I should take another chance and get a second Walkman. I wanted the back-up, because if, say, one Walkman broke a few years down the road, used Sony Walkmen were only going to become rarer and probably more expensive, too (if you go on eBay and see how expensive Walkmen are now you will see that I was right about this!). I was thinking long-term. Two decent-quality Walkmen would probably allow me to listen to cassette tapes for another ten years or maybe even more than that.

This is the "sporty" Walkman I found on eBay.

A few days later, my new (used) Walkman arrived, but I was a little bummed because it wasn’t working all that great at first. I was hoping this was my imagination, but I felt it was running slightly slow. The vocals on the tapes sounded a little too deep, if you know what I mean. I contacted the seller and he admitted it wasn’t my imagination; he had noticed the slowness as well. I was, like, “Dude, you should have told me this up front!” He apologized and said I could return it or keep it and get some of my money back. I was probably falling for a trap, but I decided to keep the Walkman and get some of my money back, knowing full-well that the seller had likely been hoping for this to happen; he probably just wanted this Walkman out of his hands. I thought I could maybe fix the speed issue since there was a “key” on this particular Walkman that allowed you to adjust motor speed.

After spending a lot of time, messing with the speed key, I wasn’t getting anywhere. Only a slight adjustment of this speed key made the music run way too fast and then another slight adjustment in the opposite direction would make it too slow again. It was almost impossible to get the Walkman running at a standard speed.

Resigning to the fact that I had been fleeced, I put that Walkman to the side and mostly just used my other Walkman. However, a few months later, I decided to try this slow Walkman again and, to my pleasant surprise, the speed issue had somehow resolved itself. Was it a miracle? It could have been, but what I’m thinking is that, because the belt had been recently replaced before I bought it, maybe it simply needed some time to “get up to speed,” so to speak. Either way, the Walkman started running properly and, a couple years later, it is still running well today.

The bass boost on this Walkman, by the way, is amazing. Rap music sounds incredible!

As I write this in 2026, I still listen to cassettes on a regular basis, but I don’t go out of my way to buy used cassettes. I mostly just have the collection I had from my childhood, some remnants from my brother’s collection, and I listen to those and mostly those only. Occasionally, I may see a cassette at a thrift store like “Savers” for a dollar, but I only buy those if they’re really good and are still in decent condition. I actually only think I’ve bought two tapes at Savers over the past few years. One tape was the Rain Man soundtrack (a great find) and another tape was a techno/house compilation from the mid-1990s called Urbal Beats(another great find).

The Urbal Beats tape I bought at Savers for a dollar.

You can still buy new cassette tapes, both online at websites like tapeheadcity.com and in stores such as Newbury Comics, but they’re limited releases and rather expensive. A new cassette tape could set you back about $20-$25, almost the same price that new vinyl records cost these days. There are some great reissued full album cassettes out there, such as Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication and Nirvana’s Nevermind, but when you’re talking $20-$25 a pop, you don’t even want to go down the road of buying new cassettes unless you have a lot of money to burn. Plus, there’s the issue of space. Tapes don’t take up THAT much room, but once you get collector fever (i.e. develop a collecting obsession) it’s hard to stop yourself and it’s just not good to have that much “stuff” in your possession.

That all being said, I enjoy the little tape collection that I do have, which is maybe three or four shoe-boxes-worth. A few years ago, my sister-in-law let me borrow her entire tape collection, so those are also included in my shoe boxes. Many of the tapes she gave me are mixtapes, probably made sometime in the 1980s, of bands like New Order, Depeche Mode, Erasure and Tears for Fears.

Erasure mixtape with classic 1980s colors.

Mixtapes are definitely something I miss making and I would like to find a stereo or boombox that would allow me to make mixtapes again. I don’t want to do this to relive the past or for ironic, i.e. hipster reasons; I actually want to make them because I have a lot of CDs that I would like to dub onto tapes. I, of course, could rip these CDs onto a computer as mp3s and then make a playlist with an iPod, but I genuinely like the sound of tape over mp3, so I would prefer to make actual mixtapes. The problem, however, is that it’s difficult to get your hands on a decent boombox that allows you to dub CDs onto tapes. I used to have a great Sony one back in the 1990s, but Sony no longer makes them and getting anything off eBay always comes with the risk of buying a lemon.

For now, I’m comfortable enough with my two Walkmen, my one Panasonic tape player/recorder and my modest cassette collection. I leave it in the hands of fate as to whether I get my hands on more cassettes or an old Sony boombox that I can make dubs and mixtapes with. Who knows: somebody out there may be getting rid of their tapes and/or a boombox at some point and these things will simply fall into my lap.

As for the fate of the cassette format in general? It’s hard to tell what the future holds for cassettes. I don’t know if I see it having a booming resurgence like what we have seen with vinyl over the past decade or so. You do see more reissued full album cassettes popping up here and there and contemporary artists like Taylor Swift have been releasing albums on cassette, so there is a tiny resurgence taking place, but I’m not sure if this tiny seed of a resurgence will take off in the same manner that vinyl did.

Part of me hopes this resurgence takes place, but I also acknowledge that, if there is a sudden influx of newly-released tapes, whether they be reissues or brand-new albums, they would all be too expensive for me to want to partake in said resurgence. I’m only interested in tapes that are about a dollar somewhere at an off-the-radar flea market. I’m not interested in paying $20-$25 for a cassette.

Nevertheless, cassette will probably always be my favorite music format of all time. Vinyl never did a whole lot for me (I didn’t like constantly having to flip over and change out the records), CDs are great quality but more difficult to listen to portably (unless you have a small enough Discman or rip the songs into mp3s and then play on an iPod), and mp3s? They can suffice if you’re desperate, but as I said before, they’re overall too flat-sounding compared to the deeper-sounding cassette tape.

Aside from the fact that tape sounds better (at least in my opinion), there is also something else different about listening to an album on cassette as opposed to another format and this ‘something’ is more mysterious. For example, I have Def Leppard’s album Hysteria on CD, digital (i.e. mp3) and cassette, but I only like to listen to it on cassette. This clearly isn’t because of sound quality because the tape is weathered and definitely sounds like it’s been around the block. Maybe I simply like listening to the album this way because it’s the very same tape that I’ve had since the late-1980s and there is an emotional attachment to it? Maybe it’s just for nostalgic reasons?

Or is there another reason?

I have no evidence of this, but I would like to pose a theory: does the magnetic oxide on a tape hold onto energy? I guess what I’m asking is whether the tape somehow carries the energy of time with it? Do I like listening to the Hysteria album on cassette because it’s emitting some of the energy of the 1980s when it plays, like actual emotions and feelings from my childhood in the late 1980s? It’s an intriguing theory because I remember, back when I was interested in paranormal activity, hearing about the “stone tape theory.” This paranormal theory suggested magnetic materials in the environment could store information, emotions or feelings, which could explain the phenomenon of a “residual haunting.” A residual haunting, if you don’t know, is paranormal phenomena where an event (usually an intense one that is either traumatic or euphoric) plays itself out over and over again, kind of in a loop, within a certain environment. I don’t want to get too off the rails with this, but maybe it is possible that cassette tapes do hold onto energy from a certain place or time in our lives and this is why listening to music in cassette form may be much different an experience than listening to it in another form, like CD, mp3 or even vinyl. In other words, our old cassettes could be like little time capsules holding onto energy from our past childhoods or teenage years, especially if we used to listen to these tapes a lot growing up.

The "haunted" Hysteria cassette.

If there is any truth to this theory whatsoever, it would certainly be something that makes cassettes unique as an audio format. Not only do they play great music, not to mention sound great, but maybe … just maybe … they even hold onto time as well.

Either way, a case can certainly be made for cassette and I’m not talking about one made of plastic. Cassettes, at the very least, have a unique sound to them, and it’s a good sound, too, so for that reason I think they will not ever go completely extinct as an audio format.

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MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Weird Monster, Supermarket Zombies!, The Woman and the Dragon and Johnny Cruise. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, My Raging Case of Beastie Fever, Jungle F’ng Fever: My 30-Year Love Affair with Guns N’ Roses, I Turned into a Misfit and I Used to be a Gamer. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.