Mix tape

With all of the “winter” cleaning we’ve been doing at home, we’ve stumbled upon a number of charming yet forgotten items, the most recent of which is a collection of hubby’s cassette tapes. Though now considered an obsolete format for storing music, hubby is still the proud owner of quite the collection. I think deep down he passionately wants to establish a museum honoring his own history. He tends to keep many really old things. We have a chair of his grandfather’s that is broken in every way possible. We also have a cardboard fish fin that hubby can’t let go of.
Anyway, hubby’s cassette tapes range from Puff Daddy to Whitney Houston to Too Short to DC Talk, but mostly circulate the realm of bad hip-hop. Honestly, I didn’t know hubby had it in him. But I have no room to poke fun. I own too many bad CDs of my own.

By far my favorite tape in his collection is the “Jen & Jed…Always” Mix tape. This ex-girlfriend Jen must have been one special gal to have become such a comfortable fixture in hubby’s tape collection, a collection that is just an inch away from being called an artifact. I asked him if we could throw out the mix tape and I believe I heard the faintest sniffle before he uttered a subdued yes.
In the end I think it will be for the better good if we just get rid of the entire tape collection. You don’t hear of too many people who collect these things these days. Except for this guy (http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/cassettes.html).
It’s rather odd to me that this is the storage format that didn’t last. People hang on to their 8-tracks and vinyl records. Today’s recording artists are even going so far as to record digitally and on vinyl. So why not tapes?
Is it because we’re not yet far enough removed from the format? Maybe they were just not ever really that efficient. Should we hang on to these things in the hopes that one day they’ll be worth something?