Taping over my life

They rattle in their plastic encasings, fragile and unpredictable. They whir, warp, stretch and twist as easily as Cher's face. It's easy to see why cassette tapes longevity never quite reached the 21st Century. I recall many a time having to manually 'rewind' or 'forward' my cassette tapes with a pen or pencil, all the while carefully ensuring the 'tape' inside isn't condemned to an impossible knot of plastic fury making for consternated listening. The inaudible auditory deformations of sound that could emanate from a thoroughly abused tape left many a moron believing the devil was in the mood for making contact. This very fickle trait of the cassette helped pave the way for CDs and committed the once-loved tape to the annals of music history. But oh how I long for tapes, their many imperfections and seemingly endless nostalgia.
In 1962 Philips unveiled to the world the first compact cassette audio tape. Like cavemen discovering fire, I can only imagine the manic curiosity this rectangular invention incited. To this day I ask myself: How the hell do they put actual sound onto a magnetic piece of tape? My eyes rolled into the back of my head once as a mate tried to explain the mechanics of a cassette in high school. It was the music I was after, not convoluted explanations.
However, in my not-so-tender 30s I find my perplexion and curiously stimulated once again. My deep musical nostalgia has expanded from a now firmly galvanised passion for vinyl LPs to cassettes. My next mission - to find a functioning tape player. My aim - to re-ignite my somewhat mawkish musical desires for these beautifully imperfect devices.
Fast forward to mission accomplished. My wife's mother discovered her old CD/tape player (you gotta love moms) dating back to her teens and so this added to my desperate momentum to explore what would be a slice of my distant, dark, precarious almost completely forgotten adolescence. To my immense delight Nirvana's 'In Utero' whirred into action as I slipped the tape into the 'cradle' of the tape player, reintroducing my aging ears to a muffled, scratchy version of Kurt Cobain belting out 'Serve the Servants'. I was 15 again, enamored with mindless rage and rebellion, enthralled by all that was anti-establishment and boobs, of course. Once again I was sitting in my bedroom, my fortress against adulthood, memorising the lyrics to Pearl Jam's 'Jeremy', Rage Against the Machine's 'Freedom' and REM's 'Drive'. Play, stop, scribble, play, stop, scribble. Such haphazard transcribing led me astray with many a lyrics being contorted into incomprehension. The words 'A libido' in Nirvana's 'Smells like teen spirit' was construed as 'Allen Beedo'.
Mixed tapes were for the better part of the 1980s the equivalent of climbing a medieval castle's walls to reach your star-crossed lover, where soft words and sacharine emotions would be laid bare. Many a mixed tape, complete with soppy songs, cringe-worthy messages and drawings on the tape cover were given to girlfriends. Although I do believe at least a few girls I tried to woo in my teens were apparently rather taken aback at the inclusion of death metal outfit, Fear Factory, and industrial-meisters Ministry, on a few of my cassettes (listen carefully and romance can be heard in strange places). But through mixed tapes, awkward emotions could be given a voice, anger could be vented and imaginations awoken.
My late grandmother had a small yellow radio/tape player, one of only a handful of worldly possessions she still had in the last years of her life. My memory bank is littered with fond thoughts of my sister and I lying around the radio, colouring in, smacking each other amid constant teasing all the while listening aimlessly to tapes, as my Gran admonished us. That radio accompanied me through my teenage years and was later christened with tip ex, stickers and crudely-pasted pictures of Eddie Vedder and Jim Morrison.
It was via a roughly-handled tape I discovered Nine Inch Nails, The Sisters of Mercy and The Cure. An education in music, my tutor - the cassette tape.
When Radio 5 arrived on the frequencies of those of us condemned to the sticks and voids of small towns, so another chapter in my growing relationship with tapes and music was written. The other day, to my delighted amazement I came across legendary DJ Barney Simon's voice, urging me to 'Crack it up!' as Manic Street Preachers exploded onto the radio waves. I almost cried. My adolescence flushed back into my head. Simon may as well have narrated my youth as every single week night for over 5-years I couldn't tear myself from the radio. I was poised, blank tape loaded in the yellow radio. My finger stiff and alert, at the ready, lingering over the record button. Many a mixed tape were birthed through such crude means. During the great musical drought of the 1990s in South Africa, where the only bands and artists to found in music stores were 2 Unlimited and Ace of Base, I had only Radio 5 to save me.
In my re-discovery of tapes, I found myself toying with them, examining them, trying to decipher what I was thinking at the time when I scrawled 'Hatred is purity' on one such tape cover. Entire lives have been documented through music and the cassette tape. I doubt the same kind of sentimentality, as sickening as it can seem, will ever be properly replicated with CDs, as they were in the heady days of the tape. And that's why, as I placed the few tapes that have survived my childhood and life, back into storage, I found myself tenderly wrapping and enclosing them; a rudimentary means of preserving another music artifact. I hope to show the few I still have and which may survive to my future child. I expect a puzzled frown from the little sprog as I try to share this wistfulness. Future generations may not fully appreciate the tapes role in music, it's simple delight.