New School Position; Thats Right Make Your Mixtape, make sure you include a neckerchief and an '82 Nissan Stanza for me to listen to it with.

Dear Old School,
You are so cute. Pining for your days of 16 year old love and the fourth Toad the Wet Sprocket album on tape. God that was good wasn't it? She had given that tape so much love, and you listened to it again and again and again and ....SNAP!

Now its broken, and your dumb ass meaningful tape is completely useless. Whats that you say? Oh you say you can connect the tape with scotch tape and it will be fine? Ummmmm...have you seen an 82 Nissan Stanza Hatchback eat a tape before? That thing is gone, unsalvageable. You literally would be better served trying to sew your girlfriend a handbag out of that tape. Which would be quite kitchy, so maybe you should do that. (To late, somebody already did) She can bring it to your DJ set and sit at the bar talking about how cool you look in your neckerchief.

Cassette Tapes are useless in todays world. They have gone they way of DOS, the rotary phone, Reebok Pumps, and the abacus. The modern equivilant, the mp3 playlist is such an amazingly more useful tool that it hardly bears defending. But, because you old school have taken such a ridiculous stance, i will try to compare.

A tape can hold, at most 180 minutes of music. And that was on one of those super long slow play tapes that would suck the batteries out of your walkman faster then you could curse the energizer bunny. Today, even the most craptastic mp3 players (like any of these) hold a minimum of 1 gig, which will give you about 500 songs. Even if every single song was a fantastic 1 minute misfits jam, you still would get 320 more minutes of music then that tape.
In addition, that tape, needed a walkman. Or in my case an 82 Nissan Stanza Hatchback, which was just about as useful as a walkman. No you had to charge around with something the size of a small brick clutched in your hand, or attached to your belt, which then made your pants fall down. It seemed the only people who really mastered the walkman thing were roller-bladers, and i don't think, Old School, that i have to talk anymore about that.

In the end, it is hard to fight the meaning you imbibe in the tape making. But shouldn't meaning by put into anything that meaning was intended to be put into. if you give your significant other a mix, and she doesn't listen to the whole thing and understand every nuance, is that because the technology allowed her to skip around, or because you made a crappy mix? You are stretching to give the form an extra bit of content, when really the content is the same regardless of the form it comes in.