You Know You Are a 90s Kid...

March 20, 2013

So, I was doing some spring cleaning this past weekend like finding old clothing to donate, vacuuming, battling dust bunny territory in cupboards, and reorganizing things in the kitchen. I’d forgotten how much stuff we had. And little did I remember, we used to have cassette tapes. We still had a couple hiding in the back of the drawer behind the white pages—one was the Jurassic Park soundtrack and has my favorite song to play on the violin.

I started to think about how far my music listening experiences have come. My first portable music experience was with a Sony Walkman cassette player. It was my sisters; I didn’t get to use it often, and even when I did, I didn’t have a cassette to my name. Somehow I was used as free labor, using a pencil to rewind the magnetic tape back into the cassettes for my sisters.

The day I opened my first CD was for my 8th birthday. I got the Power Rangers movie soundtrack. Hands down, probably the best birthday I’d ever had, and I still listen to it. But the only conundrum was that I didn’t have a CD player to play it on. My mom’s huge, hulking stereo system, which played cassettes as well as CD’s, was the only device I could use, and that didn’t happen often since I was only 8 at the time. So, CDs stayed pretty popular for quite some time, at least as far as my memory goes—that was until the mp3 player came on the scene.

In fact, I didn’t really know much about mp3 players until the CD player in my sister’s jeep broke; that was our means of getting to and from school my freshman year of high school. She bought a cheap player and a radio transmitter so that we could listen to our own tunes over the radio. Now, my sisters were given iPods when I was in 7th grade. I always wondered why I never got one, but I didn’t really question it since I got my own laptop that year. I was always fighting them for time to do my homework on our shared desktop, so it was a relief to have my own. Then I found the awesome world of computer gaming and haven’t looked back since.

Since those days, I’ve had numerous mp3 players and iPods, testing each one’s capabilities and new functions. My favorite was probably the mp3 player that could record music from radio stations; that was pretty sweet, though the technology even then wasn’t new but still cool.

Now, instead of purchasing a CD full of one artist’s songs, I can spend about the same $15 on numerous songs from various albums; this makes my OCD stir up a little. Now the days are gone when we have to spend so much money on a whole album just to get the few songs we really want.

Now, I use Freegal to get my music rather than running straight to iTunes. I like mainstream tunes but also bands that people haven’t really heard of before; it makes car rides with friends entertaining because it’s not the same stuff over and over again. Freegal has a whole collection of music, from popular, mainstream tunes to bands not all of us have heard of before. It's good for any type of music lover!

~Cody C.
Parkville Branch