How every fucked up thing in my life was just gone. How I’d sit up at night and put those headphones on and close my eyes and just get lost in these tapes. I love thinking back to when I was homeless and all I had in the world to my name was a backpack filled with some clothes and books, and my beloved yellow Sony walkman that had autoreverse, and about ten tapes that I had bought off a local merchant in Charlottesville Virginia.
Not nearly as pristine and digital as CD’s, not as long lasting as CD’s, and yet so much better. I love that back then hip hop mixtapes were a thing of beauty, when in reality it was a simple cassette tape. I love hearing an R&B song flipped over the beat to Busta Rhymes Woo Ha! I love hearing another R&B track flipped over Fugee’s Ready or Not. I love Hip Hop Blends which just aren’t the same anymore. How do you NOT love that? It’s like a time machine back to when hip hop was cool. Hearing songs that are close to 20 years old and hearing them introduced as “this brand new joint”. Things like Puffy yelling “AS WE PROCEED….TO GIVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED….” or “9-5 MOTHERF*CKER! GET LIVE MOTHERF*CKER!”. I love listening to an old mixtape and hearing something that sounds clichéd as hell now, but was BRAND NEW then. Even MP3 rips of the tapes you hear that higher pitch to the voices where they aren’t quite at chipmunk levels but close, although the speed of the song is the same, the voices are different. I figure it’s from all the play it’s gotten over the years. I love that when I listen to it the voices are slightly higher pitched for some damn reason. I love that it’s not pristine and cleaned up. I love when I listen to some of the old cassette tapes there’s that hiss in the background of the music. You could pick up a tape, regardless of the packaging, and say “Ron G? Sold.” or “DJ Clue? Sold.” “DJ Lazy K? Sold.” Now it’s “well, this cover is wack I’m not even going to look at that one”. Back then it didn’t matter what your artwork was, it was about what was on the tape, not what was wrapping the tape. I love how the artwork was not as elaborate as today.
#Logic mixtapes as i am download
If you want it, it’s there you can download it (legally or otherwise). Now everything’s just there for the taking. There’s no spending hours and hours just looking through all the stacks of vinyl or all the racks of cds marveling at the artwork and imagining some weird scenario of you walking in with a thousand bucks and buying up whatever you wanted. There’s no back and forth procrastinating. There’s no joy of thumbing through the tapes or cds in the store and deciding what you’re going to spend your fifteen bucks on. There’s no buildup anymore, there’s no surprises. These days, as I said, everything is available immediately. You’re seeing these rapper’s names and you’re thinking “oh man, they have a new song out? Oh wow those rappers got together on a track?” and it’s a type of pleasure that is hard to achieve these days. It’s hard to explain really, but looking at those cassettes was like looking at the Holy Grail or something. So unlike today where within minutes of a song leaking out it’s on 50 different blogs all thinking they’re the one who’s going to get all the internet traffic looking for it, then it was something different. Unless you had a store in your town that had connections to New York you just were out of luck.
I know that probably sounds strange to kids growing up with the internet where everything you could possibly want is right at your fingertips, but it was different back then.īack then if you lived in certain areas of the country, shit was just not available to you. And I was overcome with this wonder and amazement. I was looking through the tapes and seeing all these names of rappers that I had kind of heard about, but not much.
I was 20 years old and had taken a trip to the Potomic Mills mall near DC and there was a kiosk inside that had these tapes. Back in 1995 I first discovered hip hop mixtapes.
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