They Reminisce Over Tapes
So this site has been making the internet rounds lately. Some weird japanese dude has collected several hundred varieties of blank tapes. Now as bizarre of a hobby as this is, it really is a quite beautiful sight and strikes a chord with me. I think when people visit this site they tend to remember the “Cocaine Blunts” thing, thinking i was some punk kid cracking drug jokes. In actuality, the true relevance of the name is drawn from the more conspicuous modifier and hip hop tapes. That’s why we chose the name. Tapes to me are more hip hop than anything in the universe. That’s my one element right there. The rap tape. Fuck KRS and whatever his temple tells you. You could do seven windmills while rapping and leave a hand style on the cardboard box beneath you, but if you’ve never worn out a cassette you need to get the fuck out of here and go to a rave or something.
In the mp3 blog press frenzy a lot of writers compared the phenomenon to making a mixtape and that’s just not the case. As much as i love what technology has done for the dispersion of music (such as providing me with a venue to wax like this), it will never come close to the hand to hand distribution of a really good pause/mixtape. it pains me to think that the youth of this and future generations will never know what it felt like to have to tape new songs off the radio if the album hadn’t drop and you either couldn’t find or afford the cassingle. They’ll never fret over getting everything perfect on a mixtape for or about a girl you had a crush on, they won’t know third generation hiss or cross their fingers in hopes that the drop outs won’t be that bad after rerecording over a tape for the sixth time. They’ll never shove tissue in the top of a wack retail tape to record some good shit, or have a song cut off at the end of the side and have to rush to flip over the tape to get the rest of it. ipod playlists are heartless beasts in comparision. when i look through the tapes on that website i have a rush of good memories. here just a few things that come to mind when i see specific tape designs. Bear in mind, I came up in at the tail end of the cassette generation. I’m sure someone like Phill Most could tell you some stories about tapes that’d put mine to shame. But here goes:
the classic. i can distinctly remember little dude noz frantically scrambling for one of these to record the radio premier of snoop dogg’s “what’s my name” and when i couldn’t get the first 30 seconds or so, i had to wait around for like an hour with my finger on the pasue button for them to play it again. that was my first official rap prerelease fervor, and nothing since then has quite matched it. shit was crazy. i think i can at least partially attribute that to the cassette era, downloading an mp3 wouldn’t have taken a fraction of that effort and i probably wouldn’t remember it. It’s not like I’ll ever be sitting here reminiscing about watching a file transfer bar stall at 99% on a cipher divine download.
the first. back around ‘93ish i had my first pause tape exchange with the homie h***y g*****, who made this tape, sloppily labeled ‘the shampla’. it was mostly songs that he boosted from his older brothers collection to look cool – shit like shonen knife and nirvana b-sides. but man that opened up the floodgates for exchanging music like a motherfucker.
the retro. these were my old mans tapes, he had a handful of them in a drawer (actually i think he had the 60 minute version) and i used to boost them from his desk drawer to record on. i don’t think he even noticed, dude did not give a fuck about music. i once interviewed my great uncle max for an class project on the depression and recorded it to one of these.
the random. i have no idea why i remember this so vividly, but i had a tape of a local metal band on one of these. it was somebodys older brother’s group or something. the band was called darkness (real original, huh?) and they sucked. but the tape was titled ‘best of darkness’, which i always thought was funny. i wonder what their worst was like.
the classy. these were my top choice in high school, even though i couldn’t afford them all the time. my backpacky ass used to tape bahamadia’s b-sides on 103.9 on one of these on friday night, listen to it all week and then tape over it at the end of the week. i could get maybe three runs before it was so distorted i’d have to cave and crack the seal on a new tape. i have no idea why i was so into that shit at the time, it was always like “tonights guest is breeze evahflowin, try to keep it clean”. i guess i had to take what i could get, since i only sorta lived close enough to get wkcr stretch & bob, and i eventually gave up staying up late on thursdays only to fight with the fuzz. but when they went to hot 97 on sunday nights for a few months before the split i would also record those. that was the first place i heard eminem. i think i still got the tape with the original version of ‘my name is’ somewhere. before they forced him to take all the anti-gay lines off.
and there’s probably one or two people reading this right now that have a project blowed tape i recorded on one of these and mailed to them.via a rec.music.hip-hop trade.
these tapes suck but for some reason i had a lot of them during the time when i was an aspiring dj. there are a lot of wack baby scratches mixed down to these joints. and even before that, there are some recordings of me doing trainwrecks on one turntable. my parents preamp was such where you could hold down two channels at once and create a crude mix.
i’ve currently been using these. (that’s my own scan, homie on the japanese site isn’t this deep). they’re not the best quality, but a friend gave me a box of about 100 of them, so i’m not complaining. of course now if i want to make somebody a tape i have to ask them if they still listen to tapes first. and usually the answer is ‘no’.
September 6th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Big shout out to the Maxell XLII Blank tapes, those were my shit.
Boosting cassette singles (usually just for the b-sides) and making pause tapes is a lost art. You hit me in the heart with this one.
I still have atleast 6 shoeboxes of cassette singles. I don’t know if I’ll ever get rid of them. I still remember the 1st WU single a) protect your neck b) methodman. A pillar of anyone’s collection. Along w/ the Mic Geronimo MASTA IC single. Had time to build as the B-Side. Ja Rule, DMX and Jayz all on the same track before they had a record deal.
October 19th, 2005 at 1:45 am
Neat site!
Cool!
October 19th, 2005 at 2:20 am
I used to get the local University of Pittsburgh station on my boom box in jr high around 89-90 and taped hours of the rap show on WPTS. I still have the tapes to this day and pull them out, there are a few songs I still can’t figure out who they are by, but they are dope none the less.
On one track the chorus samples busta
“Increase the levels of the boom”
Another song the chorus is about
“Nappy Head and saggy jeans” and uses that Shakilya PRT piano loop.
anyone take a guess at these?
October 19th, 2005 at 2:29 am
when I first started hearing hiphop on the radio I used to call into shit ass kiss fm and make request then sit by the deck all day with my finger on pause. For some reason my dad’s credit card sent him some cutesy radio that doubled as a shortwave. With that I could record shit off this pirate station in Hearn Texas. Sometimes I’d get a signal from houston but that wasn’t often. Later I started trading tapes with friends and shit. In phoenix I would record the saturday night Hiphop Shop with Dj Roc, from 12-2 he had Dj Fashen and Z-trip. I use to have tons of those cheap maxwells. Lost a lot moving and letting people borrow them. I still have some, Stef’s got a gang still. I still have this busted ass scotch tape with grandmaster flash on it. I got the tape for free out of a dog food bag.
http://beerandrap.com/images/tapes.jpg
October 19th, 2005 at 2:49 am
Haha I remember Cipher Divine when I was in that “Too cool for anything but backpacker rap” mode. Where’s my mp3 copy of Fortruss by the Walkmen? haha thanks cipher divine.
I feel your pain about the Snoop recording. I also recorded that little ditty on one my messed up memorex tapes. The sad thing about the premier of that song? Half of the song is reversed curses.
Thanks for this lil trip down memory lane….
October 19th, 2005 at 4:29 am
i grew up using mostly those first joints, the maxell ur 90’s, they were 5.99 for a five pack, that was my weapon of choice. except on certain occasions, usually depending on how much i liked the girl, i would spring for the XLII 90’s. and its funny because nowadays when i meet a girl i like, i usually find out that she rocks tapes too. and i find also that i meet girls that i dislike, and they have strictly cd and mp3. just a tiny example of how we have definitely enetered a new era of humanity. it seems the times we knew are clearly behind us now more than ever. peaaace
October 19th, 2005 at 5:52 am
Tapes are more rap than ghostface. to this day i still dub everything to tape, maxell xlII’s are my fav’s. last week i rolled up to the only place left in town that sells them and copped 25 90 min tapes for .79 each. i think i got the last of them, if thats the case then its time to hit up ebay for some of those fancy blanks. they won’t feel the same as the good old maxells. right now i’m on the hunt for a dope ass walkman, i’ve been ussing the same old sony since grade 8, and its held together with a sticker and an elastic band. people ask me to make them a mix and i tell them that it will be on a tape, if their still interested after i say that i know they seriously want to hear some new music, if not, fuck em
October 19th, 2005 at 5:58 am
Yeah, the XL-II’s sounded nice but shit, the 100s crapped out all the time. Something about squeezing those extra 10 minutes made the tape too thin. I bought a lot of TDKs back in the day, usually the Ds ’cause they were cheap. Used to buy Fujis too until I realized they sounded terrible.
October 19th, 2005 at 6:10 am
I grew up with hip hop on a recorded-from-college-radio tape. That’s the only way I knew the culture. Blank tapes had a certain mystique about them and they were worth their weight in gold. I remember “Funky Beat” by Whodini blowing my mind, or “(We’re Only) Buggin” by Whistle. Fuck 50 Cent and his video game. Gimmie a good hip hop show on tape while I’m playin’ Mike Tyson on NES and I’m straight. Soundsrecorded.com coming soon for all the MANY perpetrators frontin’ these days…
October 19th, 2005 at 8:43 am
Man that brought back some memories. The one that sticks out most for me was trying to get LA Dream Teams “Nursey Rhymes” back in 86 or 87. Took me five times to get that damn song. I still have alot of the tapes I made in big ass rubber crates. Not to long ago I lent a bunch of tapes to a friend that had a tape player in his car, someone busted in and took all of them, why the fuck they wanted 10 y/o homemade tapes, I’ll never know, but I was pissed…shit will never be the same
October 19th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
propers.
October 19th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Good stuff. Brought back memories of not only recording off the radio, but I was so desperate for some hip hop that I would record off the tv. Rap City on BET. Of course my shitty cassettes were too “tight” so I had to unwind them and reel them back in with a pencil or my pinkie. Good times.
October 19th, 2005 at 4:24 pm
Haha, excellent shit.
I was like “damn” when reading about those cassettes, since I too can still remember the contents (and when they were made and why) of various cassettes by how they look.
But then.
I read that Cipher Divine shit and was like “DAMN!” Memories. Gettin’ Dre’s 2001-album from there a long time before it was released, filling my pesky 4gb HD with some various shit. And always having 1 or 2 songs cut off too early. Good stuff indeed.
October 19th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
Thank god there’s someone out there defending tapes, thanks a lot for this post, one of your best ever, and I’m glad to see that there’s a lot of people out there who the tape thing too. I remember sitting by my radio in South Boston, fucking with the dial and the antenna trying to get the signal in straight from WERS 88.9 at night so’s I could tape Optimus Prime’s show, my finger always hovering above the pause. I didn’t even know the names to half the songs and spent years afterwards trying to figure them out from ohhla.com and other people’s collections. I still have a few of em kicking around, the sound quality goes in and out and occasionally there’s this jazz song that creeps in from another station. But the best tape story I remember is my first copy of Illmatic which I dubbed off of a friend cuz I had no money and trying to scoth-tape back together the tape itself when my machine ate it. I still have all my favorite albums on cassette, mostly cuz I only have a tape-deck in my car.
October 19th, 2005 at 4:54 pm
Noz, this is your absolute best post yet. I started trading tapes with friends in seventh grade (1998) and I still do to this day. For new friends I meet they tend to think that the compilation of a legitimate mixTAPE is strictly out of nostalgia and can’t break down how much love and thought and time needs to go into making a perfect tape. I spent sumer 2004 wowing girls with the mixtape when they had recieved cars that didn’t have CDplayers in them. I also spent my senior year of high school taping my local college radio hiphop show The Beat Box on 770 Radio K, and I have some great freestyles from midwest MC’s that stopped in and the likes of Immortal Technique who did it for about 15 minutes straight. That was also how I took songs that were only on vinyl with me when I went on walks.
But seriously, this is a post for the record books. Well done.
October 19th, 2005 at 5:59 pm
apart from the rave crack, excellent post. i will be blatantly ripping this off as soon as i can scan some of mine in.
October 19th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
holy shit this post took me back! I love it – I’m gonna link it up on my livejournal – propers for the memories. I used pretty much all those joints you mention!
LOl at putting tape to record over retail wack joints…
wax
October 19th, 2005 at 6:49 pm
me and caps were just talking about getting rips of brick city kids and thirstin howl III 12″s off cipher divine back in the freshman year dormroom days. those clear maxells with the red square were pretty damn nostalgia-laden too. great post.
October 19th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
This is for Rev Mallard, i think the song your talking bout that uses the “Raise the levels of the boom” sample is by this group called N-Tense, the song is called “Raise the levels of the Boom.” I got that 12.” They were from Central Islip, Long Island. I think they were down with Curt Cazal from JVC Force (i think). It came out in 93 on Phatwax records. Yeah i remember them days of taping mix shows on the radio. Hell thats how i learned how to spin was recording my mixes on cassette and then driving around listening to my pathetic shit at the time lol. Peace
October 19th, 2005 at 7:25 pm
i remember like 4 years ago when a friend taped this christian hip hop show it actually had some dope tracks then i got a tape/radio player and recorder for christmas and i went crazy i taped everysong i loved on the radio it was like a six month long addiction then i got the internet and that went to hell but man was those the months…..
October 19th, 2005 at 7:35 pm
Wow….this takes me back.
In Cleveland, our best outlet for good hip-hop was (and is) the college radio stations: WUJC (now WJCU), WCSB and WRUW especially. I still have song order in my head. Only on that tape would “Mack Daddy On The Left” by De La Soul come right before “Words I Manifest” by Gang Starr.
The last good tape I made was 1/1/99. A local radio show was running down the best songs of 98:
7. 3 card Molly – Xzhibit, Ras & Saafir
6. Making A Name For Ourselves – Common f/ Canibus
5. My Flows is Tight – Lord Digga
4. 5 Star Generals – Shabaam Sadeeq
3. Don’t See Us – The Roots
2. Dynamic (rmx) – Pumpkinhead
1. Just Don’t Give a Fuck – Em
It was the first time I had heard My Flows is Tight. I will never watch “The Price is Right” the same again…
For the record, the Maxell UL II 90’s were the bomb.
I love this article…
October 19th, 2005 at 8:17 pm
Funny you should mention raves. I had as many techno and rave mixtapes as I had hip hop ones. Everybody used to try to mix and pass the tapes around and record over everyone else’s mix. I used to record on those things until they broke. I only used TDK tapes, though, I don’t know why. I think it’s my dad’s fault — he would buy albums on vinyl and tape them and return the albums to the store.
I’ve still got a bunch of old radio shows on tape, some mine, some other people’s. I used to tape all kinds of stuff out of New York when I lived in Connecticut. I bought an old car that had nothing but a cassette deck a few years back, so I rocked a bunch of my old tapes for a while. The sound quality was really bad because the tapes were so old, and the tape deck was beat up as well, so it would break the tape about one time out of ten. I had to put a CD player in pretty quick.
October 19th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
Much props. I know all the tapes except for those old school ones that the pops had. I cant’ remember all the shows but there was 3 very memorable ones.
1. Baka Boyz – Friday Night Flavors: the baker boys were the best thing to EVER come out of Bakersfield. Plus I think they had a lot to do with Power 106 in LA shifting from playing mostly house music to hip hop.
2. Sway & Tech – The Wake Up Show: best hip hop radio show ever before Sway was a dang VJ on MTV
2. Mike Nardone – We Came From Beyond: Broke Dilated and Jurassic and who knows who else and too many under-under ground one hit wonders to list.
October 19th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
What I liked best about putting mixes onto cassettes was, if you had a crappy enough system, you could blend two songs together by pressing the record button halfway down on your stereo. Then you’d have the new song at about half volume layered over whatever was still on the cassette. That’s the closest I came to actually blending a song until I could afford turntables.
The maxells with the green and white lettering that said “Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell” were my tape of choice.
October 19th, 2005 at 9:15 pm
i love that all you guys enjoyed this post. i kinda expected it to hit with a thud and everyone would be like “where the random rap mp3s at already?”
jason – that walkman song is the quintessential cipher divine song. not that it’s good or anything, it’s just sooo cipher divine. i’m suprised anyone remembers that shit.
ian – i fucked with the tdks a lot as well but the quality is just filth.
deac – i know what you’re talking about. there are still songs to this day that i expect to hear an unrelated song after thanks to playing out a mixtape so much.
October 19th, 2005 at 9:24 pm
man i didnt even buy CD until 1998, when i was 19; tapes were my jam. I remember, like most of you, sitting waiting to release the pause button (that was the next level – realizing not to keep hitting the record button which caused the harshest transitions between joints) when my jam came on. Funk Flex would drop the bomb on that shit like 50 thousand times, keep restarting the wax just to make you go CRAZY. I still go back sometimes and listen to that shit, like the first time he played CREAM, Nas Is Like, Whats My Name, or whatever. Most people don’t even a tape deck anymore.
October 19th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Can’t forget about those Maxell blank tapes or rec.music.hip-hop days. Defnitely the nostalgic post for alot of us.
October 19th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
best post you’ve ever done, bar fucking none homey
dipset purple city bird gang
Max
October 19th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
Awesome post. I had important album dubs or mixtapes on all but one of those cassettes you posted.
October 19th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
My ghetto ass still mixes on tapes!
Plus I know hella people who still use them cuz that’s what they have in their car.
October 20th, 2005 at 12:17 am
How about this:
I remember taping songs off of the t.v. set with my boombox next to the t.v. They would always sound horrible, but it was the only way I could receive hip-hop singles. I remember recording Joe-Ski Love’s “Pee Wee Dance,” EPMD’s “You Gotz to Chill,” and many others.
Some of my favorite memories are with tapes: I remember the day that we were snowed in from school and I had just bought Stetsasonic’s “In Full Gear” and spent the entire next day listening to it over and over and over again. Or the time I was sick from school for a couple of days and did nothing but play Mike Tyson’s Super Punch Out and listen to Public Enemy’s “It Takes A Nation.”
I didn’t stop buying tapes until about ‘98. I remember buying “FunCrusher Plus” on tape. I actually think the last album I ever bought on cassette was the Black Star album.
October 20th, 2005 at 12:57 am
you know it was all about the XLII’s…
October 20th, 2005 at 5:55 am
be on the look out for a new 10deep design in stores now.. will also be availabe online at digitalgravel.com and tenthdivision.com. very relevant to this post..
October 20th, 2005 at 6:16 am
That post took it back. I hadn’t thought about most of what you mentioned – wasn’t it always a bitch when the radio DJ would talk way too far over the beginning of a song or come in way too early at the end? And yeah, you never knew exactly when that certain song was going to come on… “In this hour”… and you’d have to sit around for the whole fucking hour.
I could go on and on, fond memories.
I recently found one of my last remaining radio tapes.
I posted it up here: 09/05: 1988 hip-hop/r&b radio broadcast – WZAK, Cleveland for those that would like to peep it. Nothing exciting, but plenty of exactly what you’re talking about.
October 20th, 2005 at 8:33 am
This shit strikes a chord with me too. I can feel a lot of what is being said here. I can especially feel 33jones because I taped over my sister’s class of ‘94 mixtapes all the time[she was heated!]and once in a while the songs could be heard simultaneously throughout the whole side…O.C. eerily morphing into Nine Inch Nails or some shit. Mash up bootches.
Overall cassettes are the rawness. I still record directly from my turntables onto cassette and blast them in my hooptie. Mattafac, I just recently bought a nice Harman Kardon deck because my old one was beat up to the point where it took 10-12 attempts for the play button to actually engage. I’m also looking to invest in a old ghetto blaster with the turntable built in…
Maxell makes a nice tape[gray ones especially - DJ Screw style]but I love the oddball designs that some of the other manufacturers came up with- dude’s collection is impressively large. Noz- your bare looking tapes are kinda tight oslo. I like the THAT’S brand of tapes, too. Some Euro jernts.
Chicago kids should know the WNUR & WHPK radio shows were what it was. I have bins of tapes from Kevin Beacham’s Time Travel show and I would call up and be like how does someone know this much more than me…thus begun our sohabship and my tenure studying under his rap tutilege…
I used to manipulate this Fisher uber-tapedeck at my parent’s house so that I could do basic beat juggle patterns with the ultra slick pause button before I could afford actual turntables- it was so much damn fun.
Did anyone else out there hit pause and only record their favorite lines from songs…it was fun to listen to the results because sometimes I would be accurate as hewwwl. I could on for days…
October 20th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Great article! I enjoyed that very much.. Its a worldwide musiclover phenomenon, I used to wear out them maxell’s taping childhood hero Tommy Tee’s “national rap show” every friday here in Norway…
October 20th, 2005 at 12:29 pm
Wow I have used so many of those tapes over the years…I agree with the mix/pause tapes and the dusty dub of the dub over the dub steez…but man the mp3 was a dope thing too happen to hip hop…it allows us to collect and document tracks, imagine if mp3s were around in the 1980’s can you imagine how much obscure material would not have been lost?.
October 20th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
Sick
October 20th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
Surge-
Hell yeah, WHPK is still raw, you know the All Nat song “Chatham” where O-Type Star reps it?
October 20th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
excellent, excellent post.
Ian – you’re dead right about the shit quality of the xl-II 100s…but sometimes you just had to have those extra minutes. it was a deinite trade-off. i wonder if a more satisfying and dependable product has ever made than the XL-II 90s. cheers to Maxell.
my first cassette dubs were Run DMC – Run DMC and Fat Boys – Crushin. i can vividly remember one BBQ when my friends and i ran around the corner, away from our parents, and took turns listening to ‘protect yourself/my nuts’ again and again. what a pain in the ass it was to rewind…but, oh, the anticipation and laughter.
i still have this crazy $15 super-sophisticated, state-of-the-art, most-excellent-of-all Denon tape that i got on sale for like 5 bucks once…unopened. it’s been like 8 years but i refuse to use it. it’s too precious, just the way it is. one day, when chuck and flav get into the white house, i’ll use it to tape their inaguration speech.
October 20th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
u topped yourself on this one.
i remember turning my shit off, hitting record, and turning it back on to prevent the pop.
October 20th, 2005 at 7:27 pm
Man, I remember the day I realized:
1. that 60 min tapes had better sound quality so that all the tapes I would give away would be on 60 min tapes
and
2. that my new tape player broke.. sorta.. now I could pause something with the play button down and that way the songs would merge. There’d be no break just a beautiful lead straight into the next song.
Damn, life was good.
October 20th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
I used to dub vinyl or CD’s on to tape for car or walkman enjoyment. Putting a 60 minute album on a 90 minute tape leaves one with a dilemma:
let the autoreverse do its thing and break up a song when the recording tape turns around
try to figure out whether to end side one after song 10 or 11 (but then the autoreverse playback doesn’t work and a what a pain when track times aren’t listed)
record side A to the first side, then reverse the tape and record side B (not all good with wasted tape and longer side B’s)
October 20th, 2005 at 10:39 pm
LOL DAAAAAMN man your bringin back hella memories for real.I used to stay up recordin the wake up show(back when it was tight) and just hella random shit off the radio.Press pause and record and wait for any new shit to come on then unpause.If you fuck up,rewind a lil play and stop right before the song cuts off than pause and record again lol.I still have all my cassettes,mostly bullshit radio recordings and since I would never have money for new tapes I’d have to make the hard decision of which tapes to record over.It wasnt til I discovered how to record over wack ass real cassettes that I ended up recordin over hella my Mom’s sorry tapes she hardly listened to.Damn I miss that shit tho.I used to make my own ghetto ass mixtapes with whatever Bay shit my homies/older cousins let me borrow to “dub” like Totally Insane/GLP/E-40/RBL Posse and so on.I would even try mixin it and SOMETIMES I’d get lucky and a song would flow hella clean right into the next like it was actually mixed.I would play that shit over and over like I was hella tight or some shit haha.And I can go on and on about how I use to record me and my cousins flowin or just fuckin around LOL but I taught myself how to double up my voice and shit,just have the beat playin on one radio and another one that has a built in mic and record your rap to it,than take the tape you just recorded of you flowin over the beat and play that in one radio and rap over your own voice to make it stand out more lol.Anyway,I been peepin this site for several weeks now and I dont like checkin the archives cuz I done missed out on hella tight shit for download but keep it up with this site.Thats a tight name too “cocaine blunts and Hip-Hop tapes,rubber car keys and i.d. thas fake”.This site is the shit mane,alright than folk stay up
oh and if you can,just throwin out a suggestion but if you got any early as shit from each city in the Bay that was crackin,say around 93-95 it’d be tight if you did a little somethin on how everybody had they own sound but was equally slappin.I mean maybe highlight the Bay’s “golden era” or what you think it is.I’ont know,just thought I’d throw that out there.Peace
October 21st, 2005 at 2:42 am
My experience differs from the rest of yours. Unlike y’all, my friends and I sat next to the boombox waiting for Aerosmith and Color Me Badd. The closest thing to rap music I ever taped was Kris Kross, and I remember waiting in my bed, finger poised over the record button, with the boombox beneath so mom wouldn’t catch me staying up until — gasp — 9PM on a school night! One week waiting for “Jump” on the Top Nine at 9 and always falling asleep before it aired made that song a never was. However, I did wear my Umbro shorts backwards, which was the trend at the time (no Cross Colors).
October 21st, 2005 at 7:34 am
i hope that is not a zing on breez evaflowin. forsaken is a great song.
October 21st, 2005 at 7:40 am
The ultimate were those TDK metal joints that actually had metal on the corners. They were $10 each and were heavy as fuck. I think they were called MAX-G’s or something.
October 21st, 2005 at 12:52 pm
damn i remember taping yomtv raps on videotape, and then record it on cassetes so i could listen to the walkman…
October 21st, 2005 at 3:44 pm
Damn noz, I know you’ve been totally over-whelmed with praise for this post already, but this shit is seriously great. Just to ruffle your feathers a bit though, either pedestrian or sole (can’t remember exactly wh) posted an article/rant exactly like this in ‘98 in the days when truehiphop.com was their website basically saying “Vinyl is great and all, but nothing is more ‘hip-hop’ than dubbed tapes.” Great stuff though, my dude.
-e
October 21st, 2005 at 6:12 pm
truehiphop.com was the shit! whatever quality of music those guys might have gone on to create, they’ll always get a pass in my book for having a dope website.
remember that big pun interview where they were just talking about how many cheeseburgers ate a day? was that for real? i’ve always wondered. either way it was probably in poor taste, in light of the events that followed. but at the time i got a real kick out if it.
October 21st, 2005 at 7:20 pm
That site had the best interviews ever. They had a ridiculous interview with some random DJ “DJ Sugarcuts” (I think he was a drum n’ bass DJ) and dude Sugarcuts was trying to defend the turntable as an instrument, saying he “expressed himself with it,” and pedestrian was all like “How exactly do you express yourself making little scratchy sounds?” Haha. Then they had this interview with this 16 year old girl DJ named DJ Wonder girl. They kept calling her “DJ White Girl” and kept asking her about her boyfriend and the anal sex he wanted to have with her. That too was certainly in poor taste but hilarious nonetheless. The pope throwing up the “W” was pretty darn priceless, too. Oh the good ol’ days.
-e
October 23rd, 2005 at 12:50 am
Yeah, the grey XLII’s are the shit, like vinyl and great for punchy hiphop drumz, I still have most of my tapes that take up 3 drawers without their cases even though my tape covers are in a shoe box somewhere. Don’t you love how tapes don’t skip or have scratches? Tape decks have always been a must in my ride. Big up to Mike Nardone’s “We Came From Beyond”… Oh, and Fu**you again if you ever lost one of my “killa” tapes.
This post makes me realize I’m behind in performing about 6 tape “surgeries.” I’m out, there’s probably some dope shit I forgot all about inside ‘em…
October 23rd, 2005 at 12:51 am
that was me…
October 23rd, 2005 at 1:47 am
Great post – It’s good to know im not the only one out there still making mixes on cassette tapes. It’s the best way to get people to listen to all the songs that you want them to, cause we all know no one likes to fast foward. Plus, like you said, nothing says i love you (or I’d like to have sex with you – to MY MUSIC) like a good mixtape.
It will be sad day when they take them off the market. Motherfucka’s better start stocking up like Elaine did in Seinfeld (if you know what im saying).
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:04 am
you forgot the praying the dj wouldnt talk orif he did he would only talk after the verses were finished and the song was awrap otherwise it meant waiting for that song again.
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:09 pm
Whoever brought up trading Yo MTV Raps video tapes… Yes! My friends and I were addicted to that. Talk about an old school show they need to release on DVD!
October 25th, 2005 at 10:36 pm
how the fuck do you think that the true old school MC’s came up.. they all started by hackin the mix tapes out of their trunk. I remeber Laney College in Oakland was full of the good, the bad and the fat & ugly all trying to come up with their dope mix tapes.
October 26th, 2005 at 1:13 am
I loved TDK’s and Maxell especially the ones you get at your local bodega, I used to record sick radio shows and that let that shit record at night while I slept, the metallic ones always had a weird quality to it, I used to insert tissue paper over some original tapes and record shit that was going down on the raido….those were the days!
October 26th, 2005 at 4:32 am
Word, I remember exactly when I recorded Snoop’s What’s My Name from the radio in Indianapolis. It was right before I left for a soccer game on a weeknight, and I had the song in my head the whole game.
October 27th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
@ the dood who got his Nas tape eaten up you weren’t listening properly…..
‘the smooth criminal on beat breaks / never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes’
Great post thanks !
It was all about taping Westwood for us here in the UK and Tape Kingz for the Doo Wop joints !
October 28th, 2005 at 5:32 pm
shit man! yes i do listen to tapes still. an ancient boombox is in the kitchen with a shoebox of tapes & i have a sony double cassette in my rack cause i occasionally use technology to sweaten up an old radio recording in the computer and make a digital file out of it (sigh)
i started in the 80’s with these bargain store closeout tapes that sounded ass bad. mostly taking the 45’s my mom would get me once in a while at the supermarket to tape so i could hear it in the cassette to 8-track adapter in the caddy fleetwood. shit you not.
stuff like herbie hancock, utfo, prince, duran duran, stray cats & MJ.
i used to try and scratch on my parents unit,too. not good. then by the time i was 11 or 12 i had a skate friend who’s brother had a ramp and a hardcore band & i used to dub tapes from them of all the classic 80’s punk & hardcore. so it went vinyl to cassette (for the boombox skate sessions) then that cassette went to me and i dubbed it on crappy grade cassettes. didn’t matter-i needed those songs. hiss indeed. around 7th grade i was getting into new wave as well. we had WLIR out in the burbs of new york. i still can’t part with pause tapes i did of ’screamer thursdays’ where i heard depeche mode & cure songs premiered. i didn’t watch tv at night, i read skate magazines & made pause tapes off the new wave channel.
we were always into alot of different shit at the same time. it was yo mtv raps & video jukebox on rainy days when we couldn’t skate. we were from strong island-hiphop had a name there then. i remember the red alert show back in 90 or so i think. it’s so foggy i need to hit that tape stash at my mom’s but i could swear there were jams like krisskross mashed up on supercat rhythms. that was out of control then.
tape trading was the shit for myself & my boys. i used to tape trade with people all over the place via mail.
so yeah, i still choose to spin my mixes off the one & two mostly which gives me great room for errors-but i will admit i go into protools with the mix 7 not to tape…last night i brought a crate of old funk & rock out to spin and this girl had a laptop and these fake ass records that cue your mp3’s off your computer and scratch like wax….blah…
anyway. your site is great. keep up the good.
maxell xlII’s are the goods!
thanx for a spot to divulge my memories
October 29th, 2005 at 4:03 am
Man, I have about two tons of random ass tapes from 950am/106Jamz and WGCI outta Chicago; All staticy and shit!
They (Pinkhouse) would play everything all weekend long, then I’d show up at school and play it for my other ‘white’ friends, those were the days…
I remember waiting forever with the pause button to hear Common Sense’s- Resurrection Extra P remix (whoooo!)
November 5th, 2005 at 8:55 pm
if it weren’t for tapes we’d be outta business. glad to see that there’s someone else out there who appreciates this format. our decision to continue to use tapes stemmed out of being broke as fuck and not having the ends for new wax. plus, they’re so small they’re easy to get the 5 finger discount on at the local Goodwill. and there are so many jams out there that, if you were to get on vinyl, shit would cost you $20-30 a pop. fuck that!! i never pay more than $3 for a full album.
November 8th, 2005 at 11:30 am
Wow…
Seeing those tapes brings back so many memories for me…I think I still have like 2 or 3 small boxes of cassettes of various stuff I recorded from like the late 80s early 90s diff shows and what not..
I remember when I use to be able to get Kpoo an independent station in San Francisco for a couple months I got like crystal clear reception which was something of a miracle and there was this show where they’d play whole albums I was so excited when I was able to record I believe Intro’s first album (there where like one of my fav rnb groups at the time)…
Crazy
November 18th, 2005 at 3:27 am
I used to rock with the Maxell 120’s so I could tape the entire Wake Up Show without switching tapes and edit out all the comercials. I was nice with mine!
November 23rd, 2005 at 9:46 pm
“but if you’ve never worn out a cassette you need to get the fuck out of here and go to a rave or something.”
hey this old raver has a whole box of snapped maxells to remember his high school years by…’
cheers
November 29th, 2005 at 12:50 pm
Wowzers! This brought me wayyyyy back. I can remember making pause-mix instrumentals on my first dual deck back in 88, 89. When I got my ‘01 4-runner I had to get the cd/cassette combo deck, just to keep the old stuff alive. I STILLGlad to see I’m not alone in the memorex and maxell memories.
December 13th, 2005 at 12:16 am
props man i feel da tape article
January 27th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
I was looking at those maxell tapes, and went “those the ones I got loads of from somebody on rmhh”…Project Blowed etc.
So if you’re the guy that shipped them overseas, thanks!
April 29th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Yo – for being a true head you sure have alot of metal references when refering to these tapes, kid you might have been goth wannabe and now your hip hop expert? Please kid I give you respect for diggin up some classics but any dude that wasn’t up on making hip hop tapes in the mid eighties is just a toy. True school baby we live this shit.
October 19th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
yea i still have about 800 copied rap albums from back in the day, we used to spend time making covers, taggin the lil stickers and drawing on paper then cuttin it out for a dope cover and.. course find the best blank tape to use i remember the memeorex ones with the spaceships on they were ill. and the jvc onse, clear smoked like sunglasses. with the rounded smoked case. i still got them all at my mums in the loft, i recently took my son to check them all out,. some classic stuff in there, but mostly all sound like shit now just static and hiss. ive even still got sketchbook with all the cover shapes cut out haha.
August 1st, 2010 at 7:11 pm
hi guy.