Putting Away My Youth

This week I decided to do most things that I had put off doing for three months. The list is huge and it will never end, but I can say that the greatest part of all those late tasks was related to cleaning, organizing, tearing up useless papers, and throwing away anything that is no longer needed.

While putting away my personal things, I've run across a box of many old tapes (those things that the young generations don't even know the purpose of them) and many boxes of letters and postcards (...yeah! Those were real mails written on real papers sent through post offices and delivered by mailmen.)

It's incredible how connected I was to my tapes. Before I turned 15, there was no MTV in Brazil and CD's were rare to find and when one could find them, they costed an arm and a leg. So, taping the records were the most affordable sollution to have good music playing at one's stereo.

Carefully, I dusted off each tape box and read their labels one by one. I was impressed by the bands I had recorded in those audio cassettes, there were names that I could barely remember listening to like Cocteau Twins, Devo, The Cure, Hüsker Du, The Circle Jerks, New Model Army, Agent Orange, some Brazilian musicians and not many bands from around here, after all the 80's were not so promising for national music (sorry if there is any Brazilian reader that might think like the opposite of that.) My tapes had the tittles of each song, the right names of those bands and their corresponding album names, the year which they were released and any extra necessary info.

The tapes that were in best shape were from bands of the 90's such as Luna, Stereolab, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Nirvana (Bleach), Faith No More... And many other stuff that I could name here for hours, after all they are nearly 200 tapes. Well, it was nice to picture all these albuns which were once in my hands as records and I managed to transform them into magnetic brown delicate tapes which would sound still OK in my 00's stereo. Listening to them brought me magical feelings and delightful memories that once I really cared for music.

I don't know how the current generation is coping with music. CD recorders, MP3, iPODs give a whole new aproach when it comes to making albuns. I don't really understand how musicians still develop these materials either because all is limited in computer files. And what about letter writing? Are there individuals that still enjoy exchanging letters written by hand on decorative papers, and those mails would be expected anxiously to get arrived? I remember that it was fun to check out the different stamps from overseas. Do people have nowdays keyboardpals?

It feels good to know or to reinforce in me that I have been always demanding when it came to music senses and later on I became fussier with movies, books, clothes, TV, and so forth. The tapes, the letters, and the postcards made me realize what meant to grow up in the end of the 80's and getting to know what a grunge band would sound like on the stage. Having listened to walkman before falling asleep, returning Betamax video tapes to rental stores, playing Atari games, asking to use the telephone in all places, picking up pictures developed at special photograph stores and many of them would get fuzzy, xeroxing lyrics from albums, and making my own letter sheets and envelopes from recycled papers make me confirm that I was part of a historical moment.