Music Memories: Complex Staffers Talk About Their Favorite Devices From Wayback

"I let my tape rock till my tape pop."

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Like our 8-track-spooling forebearers, we here at Complex have aged a couple decades beyond much of the consumer music technology that introduced us to hip-hop. No more Discmen, no more Walkmen, no tapes popping, #AllSpotifyEverything—we've got boomboxes, at least. Below, a few of us from the Complex music team reminisce about our favorite childhood devices, including my sporty Sony Discman, which, by my mother's hand, suffered a high-velocity demise.

Christine Werthman, Managing Editor

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My three siblings and I all received the same portable cassette player for Christmas one year, a GE 3-5470B. At the top was a little tuner dial, an AM/FM switch, and a jack for headphones. We each also got a new tape, and the one I found wrapped up in my stocking was MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em. Turns out that tape was actually supposed to go to my older brother, but no amount of coercing would get me to trade him for the one he accidentally received—the Beach Boys' Still Cruisin', featuring a rendition of "Wipe Out" with the Fat Boys.

I spent hours listening to that Hammer tape on my cassette player during car rides between Philly and Pittsburgh to visit family. The worst was when, on a quest to play "U Can't Touch This" as many times as possible, the constant fast forwarding and rewinding would somehow result in poor Hammer unspooling. I don't know how many hours my mom spent untangling tapes for us. That was more than 20 years ago, and my mom still owns and uses one of those very same cassette players. The Hammer tape is long gone though, and my brother believes that in hindsight, he came out on top. —Christine Werthman

Khal, Editor, Do Androids Dance

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Damien Scott, Senior Editor

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My most-prized musical device leading up to ninth grade was an Aiwa stereo. It had a three-CD changer, a dual tape deck that had the ability to pause itself after the end of a song, and four speakers that could be placed around a room for a surround-sound effect. I had friends who would come over just to listen to albums and make mixtapes. It was the most important gadget I owned. Then I got my own computer.

For the sake of this remembrance, I’ll jump past all the upgrades I made to the computer and focus on the part that changed the early part of my high school career: the Philips CD recorder. I don't remember the exact model, but it looked awfully similar to the one pictured above. It cost me two-and-a-half paychecks, but it was worth it. It was a game-changer for me. I could stop the laborious process of making mixtapes—actual cassette tapes mixes—using my stereo, and simply burn all the songs I had onto my computer onto CDs that I could then play in friends’ cars. And as the only one of my friends with his own computer, my room became a hub where they would come, lists in hand, to create their own mixes. 

We made mixes for every occasion: "walk to school" mixes, "study" mixes, "drive to lunch" mixes, "Friday night" mixes, Jay Z mixes, mixes full of slow jams we hoped to play for whatever girl we had a crush on, Eminem vs. Redman mixes, and mixes full of nothing but new shit. It got to the point where I was buying CD-R spindles every week. I was going through so many of them that I had to start charging $5, which, looking back now, seems more than reasonable. —Damien Scott

Justin Charity, Staff Writer

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I was en route to Amsterdam via Dulles Airport, where I bought two accessories for my two weeks in Europe: a cerulean blue Sony Discman with a sporty clasp for shock-absorption purposes; and a CD copy of Jay Z's newly released The Black Album. After having made literally dozens of dollars selling Gateway-printed bootlegs of Jay Z albums in my high school years, Jay's "retirement" in 2003 was the end of a good thing, in so many ways. I was 16 when I listened to "My 1st Song" on rewind for the entirety of a seven-hour flight.

Hov would prove to be the alpha and omega of my Discman's lifespan. About a year later, at one of those gratuitous Tuesday night church meetings that black Baptist parents drag their kids to, my mom caught me listening to disc one of the Blueprint 2, likely "Hovi Baby," but damned if I'll precisely recall; in any case, I'd ducked to one of the breakout rooms with my big-muff headphones, listening to Jay Z when mom/God would've rather preferred me to be reading Job. A nosy deacon dimed me out. On a tense, quiet ride home, when mom peeled the car onto the exit ramp, she snatched the Discman from my hands and flung it like a frisbee out the open window, into the woods. Here's hoping a hitchhiker or hobo scooped my jams from the leaves and carried on tradition. —Justin Charity

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