I recently discovered a mix tape I made back in high school.  I can remember making it quite well.  A friend of mine used to say that she only liked “happy” songs.  By that I think she meant songs that were upbeat, kind of poppy, and fun to dance or run around to.  So I made her this mix tape.  Side A is labelled “Love Song/Happiness.” Side B is “Happy Songs/(sort of).”  It must have been 1996.  I was a Junior in high school, and was beginning to have inklings of urban, post-modern culture, of style, and irony.  You must remember that this is rural New Hampshire we’re talking about.  Right around this time I had bought some old records at a local garage sale.  Lots of 70’s and early 80’s stuff, disco, etc.  Quite a bit of it ended up on this mix tape:  Gloria Gaynor, Bee Gees, Kool and the Gang “Celebration,” Elton John “Crocodile Rock,” Cyndi Lauper, “Footloose.”  Recorded onto a cheap tape off my dad’s turntable these songs now sound like they’re litterally being broadcast from another age.  Playing that tape today sounds like tinny transmitter radio reception, the type of sound that hasn’t been heard since the early 80s, which I’m beginning to be afraid I’m becoming nostalgic for.  Of course 80s nostalgia has come and is almost gone again and I was highly critical of it, but now I’m beginning to wonder if I’m belatedly getting it or if I was just being stupid and stubborn before now.  Anyways, that tape didn’t have just old stuff on it.  There was neo-hippie shit (remember, this was rural NH!) like Phish, and Rusted Root, and some vaguely cool stuff like the Cardigans, and Violent Femmes.

In the end I never ended up giving this girl the tape I made for her.  I’m not sure why.  I think she probably would have appreciated it.  Maybe I thought that she wouldn’t at the time.  Maybe I just forgot.  Maybe the parts that the record skipped made me think the tape was not good enough to give away.  So anyways, I still have the tape.  Listening to it my toes still tap and I want to dance.  I don’t know why I still like it.  Looking back at our taste from our callow youth should be a vaguely embarrasing, though happy thing to do.  Anytime our taste is captured so completely up in something at any given time it should be somehow shameful to still like it many years later, because obviously that means we haven’t quite moved on and grown as we should.  Not that we ever truly do, hence is born the notion of the “guilty pleasure.”  It’s funny, taste is one of those things that’s constantly evolving, both in terms of what our own taste is, and what society deems is tasteful or in style, but somehow everything that we’ve ever liked we still will.  It becomes a part of us, of who we are, and of course of whomever we might become in the future.  Everything we’ve ever experienced is integrated, internalized, turned around and regurgitated as our life, the adventure of us.

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Comments

Your elder music-lover

2004-04-19T15:10:08.000Z

I do not remember when the Cardigans were “vaguely cool”.  How did I miss this?  I still remember that damn, “lovaly lovame” song they contributed to the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack, but I cannot, for the life of me, remember when they were cool, can’t even vaguely remember it.  I DO remember the Darling Buds, who were just an earlier version of the Cardigans, but with more jingle-jangle & therefore better music.  I also remember when the Violent Femmes were cool because they were, dammit.  Shame on you for mentioning them in the same sentence as the Cardigans!  Two demerits for Ian, you will have to sit in the back of hipster class this week.  Tsk Tsk.

The Author

2004-04-22T00:43:42.000Z

Ok, Miss Hipsterer than thou, I know the Cardigans weren’t *Really* cool.  However, I will reiterate again (is that redundant, and if so, I meant to do that):  we are talking about rural New Hampshire.  The music cognescenti where the two guys who had a whole bunch of Grateful Dead shows on tape.  In the early 90’s we still were in the late 80’s and not the good part! 

Furthermore, in the Cardigans defense:  1) they’re from Scandinavia and met in art school, automatically making them cooler than most other people,  2) they had catchy, very upbeat pop songs that could almost instantly be taken ironically, actually putting them ahead of their time, avant-garde so to speak  3) they were on an indie label  4) the AllMusic.com online rock snob compendium still gives their second and third albums 4 and half stars and describes the band as “One of the most pleasing pop groups of the ’90s.”

So There!

Anonymous

2004-05-10T17:43:53.000Z

I’m from Kansas, I never heard of the cardigans:)  Things take an extra 10 years to hit Kansas.