I threatened to do this post earlier, and here it is, for all five of you who like looking at other people's collections of things! These are the "official" cassettes I own (plus one bootleg tape). Now I have literally hundreds of formerly blank mixtapes, but these are the comparatively few tapes that are actual albums. Some of them came from my parents, a couple actually came from my grandmother, the newest ones were purchased straight from the artist either at a concert or online, and the rest were lucky thrift store finds (and that's rarer than you think; almost every thrift shop I've been to either has country music, religious music, or Christmas music in their cassette section, hardly ever is there anything I would like). I mostly tried to group the tapes that were similar to one another, but I wasn't always able to do that for each picture.
I'll get this one down first. This isn't an official cassette. Now a long time ago in my early teens, when I was in the Boy Scouts (which I largely loathed but that's another story), the father of one of the other kids in my troop found out I liked Kraftwerk after I wore my Kraftwerk t-shirt on one of our camping trips, so he actually made this for me. He somehow printed out a very convincing cover, but the cassette itself is one of those TDK D90 tapes that I have a bunch of. It was nice of him; I suppose it's thrilling when you're middle-aged and you find out a kid is into the music you liked when you were younger. I'm closer to being middle-aged myself now so I kind of get it. I'd heard the remixed version of "Autobahn" on Kraftwerk's The Mix album before, but the first time I heard the full version (over twenty minutes long) was from this tape. There was a lot of blank space on the tape since the actual album isn't that long, which I filled with more Kraftwerk songs.
My German Polka Tapes
Every now and then, I like to put one of these tapes on as background music. It's very happy and relaxing music. The top two tapes were both lucky thrift store finds, but the bottom two, titled Es Singt und Klingt im Ganzen Land ("it sings and clings in the whole land") were two of the only things I inherited when my grandma Olga died in 2003 (I also got my own copy of my grandfather's memoir). She grew up in Austria and lived there until after World War II, so this was her type of music. I don't have a whole lot to remember her by, but I do have these cassettes. So I have a lot of sentimentality wrapped up in these tapes.
My Big Band Jazz and Swing Tapes
These were all thrift store finds. The top two are part of a set of music from the 1930's and 40's called "This Was Our Music". It's the soundtrack of a generation that by and large is gone now. This was their music. Jukebox Requests of the 1940's is the same kind of music for the most part. And we have The Hits of Judy Garland. My favorite Judy Garland song, "Never Been Blue", isn't on it unfortunately. But I snatched it anyway for like 25 cents.
Paula Abdul - Forever Your Girl
Yes, one of my sort-of guilty pleasures. I was into Paula Abdul during my early childhood. This has all her best songs; "Opposites Attract", Cold-Hearted Snake", "Straight Up", and some other lesser-known good ones.
Some Good 80's Bands from Thrift Stores
Here we have The B-52's with Cosmic Thing, an impulse buy at a thrift store for dirt cheap. It has "Love Shack", "Roam" and "Channel Z". some old favorites of mine from that band (which I was into when I was younger). Please was the 1986 debut album from the Pet Shop Boys, with their hit "West End Girls". This tape is in great shape, sounds as clear as a CD too. Journey's Greatest Hits was something I grew up listening to on a CD my mom owned, so it was good to find that again. And Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark is another good New Wave band which I had to snatch up when I saw the tape among all the bland country music tapes.
Lesser-Known Guns n'Roses and Pink Floyd Albums
The Guns n' Roses tapes belonged to my parents. I grew up listening to that band. These are the albums Use Your Illusion and Lies. The Pink Floyd tape is of their album Animals. It says it was copyrighted 1977, and if the tape is actually that old it's amazing it still works. I wish I had Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall. These three tapes are linked by the fact that they're not the more famous albums of either band.
Weird Al and MC Hammer
These are both tapes I've had since childhood. Don't ask why I have an MC Hammer tape. It's been following me around for decades now and I can't seem to get rid of it. I'm really not a fan of hip hop, but if I'm going to listen to it, I like the stuff from the 80's better than anything later. That Weird Al Greatest Hits tape accompanied many a road trip when I was a kid, and I have fond memories of it. I need to get it a new plastic case, as you can tell. I could always switch the case with a crappy country music tape from the thrift stores.
Faith No More and Korn
The Faith No More tape was definitely my mom's, she loved that band. It's my only tape with a Parental Advisory label on it. I'm a parent now and I will always think those labels are stupid. The album is Angel Dust, it doesn't really have any of my favorite Faith No More songs on it like "Epic" or "Last Cup of Sorrow", but it is what it is. Korn's Follow the Leader was an interesting find at this record store in the San Francisco Bay Area I liked to frequent when I lived there, Rasputin Records. It seems rare to find rock music from the late 1990's on cassette, as that was solidly the CD era.
Classic Rock. And The Church.
These were tapes I remembered at the last minute when I was digging through my collection. The Black Sabbath and AC/DC tapes were from my dad. They might just be the oldest tapes in my collection (along with the Pink Floyd one), actually from the late 1970's. I only rarely listen to them, but that keeps them in good shape I suppose. I'm really not that into classic rock. Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne are some of the better ones that still hold up today, got to give them credit for their contribution to the metal genre. To me though almost all of AC/DC's songs sound the same. The Church is a misfit here, another New Wave band. Alas, it isn't the album with "Under the Milky Way" or "Reptile" on it, my favorite songs from them.
Mortiis
I did a blog about the concert where I purchased these cassettes, two of Mortiis' dungeon synth albums. See I actually attended a concert in 2020! It was right before the coronavirus, of course.
Online and Concert Purchases
These are probably my favorites, along with maybe the Kraftwerk one. The top left one is The Midnight's album Nocturnal. The Midnight is one of the best synthwave bands out there, a revival of 80's music. To the top right is from the band Glaare, the album To Deaf and a Day. Glaare's music is amazing, I have to say. They are out of these tapes on Bandcamp page but you can still get the mp3's. I recently acquired Slow Danse With the Dead's debut album, as I mentioned in my Top 3 Songs of the Month for August. And finally I have Boy Harsher's album Careful, which I purchased at a concert last year in Tampa.
Not Pictured
I wasn't able to dig them up, but somewhere I have the soundtrack to the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on cassette (missing the booklet sadly), as well as the soundtrack to Jurassic Park. I'm sure they're around somewhere, in a box in my closet. The Ninja Turtle soundtrack in particular has a couple good songs on it, and is a relic of my childhood.The Jurassic Park one is just instrumental, but there was a time I would buy anything with a Jurassic Park logo on it.
Anyway, that's the collection! Thanks for being bored enough to read about it.
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