Premature Nostalgia

[This post has a slightly more specific target than just general nostalgia-bashing. Give me a minute to warm up first, though.]

I am well aware of the fact that people of my generation are excessively, annoyingly premature to jump on nostalgia trips. It's true that in one artistic medium, the video game, the '80s and early '90s were actually a really pivotal time that shaped the future of that field. In general, though, there was nothing special about that period of time. Yet a striking proportion of my generation sits around obsessing all over everyone about the "good old days," despite being far to young to have much meaningful context or perspective on our adolescent years. For that matter, shouldn't our late 20s still be part of the good days? I know everybody thinks the world was better back when they were 15, because people are egocentric enough to conflate their own youthful energy and coming-of-age excitement with the pinnacle of human civilization, but can't we at least wait until we're in our 40s like previous generations have before we start getting all obnoxious about it? Maybe it's the way the internet has sped up the world, pushing one generation out of the spotlight before their time. In any case, said trait is extremely annoying. Unfortunately, it's ubiquitous to an extent that renders criticism basically fruitless. I'll still criticize, because that's the way I am, but that's not the main thrust of this post. Instead, I want to take some time to talk about a very specific nostalgia-driven phenomenon that puzzles me to no end.

Cassette tapes are making a comeback.

Just think about that for a minute. One of the worst, least reliable, least convenient, poorest quality formats in audio distribution history is returning to the shelves for no reason other than that people approaching 30 are having their midlife crisis a couple decades too early. I've seen them again and again over the past year or so; brand new cassettes are cropping up on record store shelves. Yikes.

Now, I understand the nostalgic appeal of vinyl. For one thing, it's been around long enough to have some actual historical significance attached to it. For another thing, it was the dominant audio distribution format when most of the formative albums that shaped our musical landscape were released. Hell, we still call albums "records."

Besides that, there are non-nostalgic reasons to buy vinyl records. They have huge covers, so collectors get a much better display of the jacket art. They have a warm, rich sound that (when played through quality stereo equipment) makes for a listening experience you can't get from newer formats. They have room for cool little oddities like a never-ending loop at the end of the record. You could spin them backward and hear the music in reverse. These peculiarities helped shape the mystique around bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in a way that no modern distribution format can match. And on a really basic level, if you only want to listen to one song on the album, you can just drop the needle in that place and play it instead of having to fast forward for ten minutes.

Of course, for those who don't want to go all-out digital download mode just yet with their music collections, there are also CDs. True, there's nothing terribly nostalgic about a CD, since they're still the dominant physical format. The thing is, they replaced cassettes for a reason. You can skip songs. You have cleaner, clearer audio. You don't ever have to worry about your player eating a CD. You can leave them in your hot car without fear that they'll melt. CDs are vastly more durable and convenient than cassettes, while still giving you a much bigger, nicer cover art display and better audio quality too.

Cassettes, like eight-tracks, are nothing more than an embarrassing byproduct of audio distribution's awkward adolescent phase. They were not some superior product we had back in the day before all these kids born in the late '90s came along with their high-speed internets and cellular telephones. To think otherwise is to succumb to the same kind of collective delusion that leads 28-year-old women to believe that *NSYNC was actually any better/different than One Direction currently are (spoiler alert: they weren't). Cassettes sucked, and the 25-35 crowd needs to stop trying to resurrect shitty technology like that before we complete our premature metamorphosis into crabby old people who sit around ranting about how much better things were back in our day.