Pop Culture Nation-A Recovered Memory of Cherished Treasures

Sometime between 2004 and Spring of 2006, I forcefully slammed a very large shoebox full of cassette tapes into the garbage can at my mother's house. You don't understand. Not just original cassette tapes. Mix tapes. During the peak hipster era of High Fidelity and Say Anything (much older, because yes we were already rehashing nostalgia), I committed a high crime against art and Xennial self-determination.

I remember neither the context of the conflict, nor why I desired so strongly to sabotage myself. Was it later than then? Had I moved out again? Was it closer to 2008? I couldn't tell you.

But I knew I was on one of my decluttering kicks. Inasmuch as I am messy and allow things to pile up (hopefully not to a hoarderly level) I have also gotten on occasionally forceful kicks of throwing my possessions away. Mostly because they reminded me of a part of myself that was over. Around this same time I think I dumped all the handwritten letters between me and beloved friends between middle school in the mid 90s and even through the early 2000s. Even including loving letters in French from my grandfather in Romania. It was time to leave all care behind. I remembered the thud they made in the mostly empty garbage bin, late at night. That suburb could be jarringly quiet.

And as I moved forward in life, I started to deeply yearn for some of what I'd thoughtlessly trashed. A copy of Joni Mitchell's "Blue" plus some additional tracks that a person deeply infatuated with me, who was also a beloved friend, taped for me. In a way it was a note between us. This song was about when I moved. This other one was about both of us missing California. This song was about no one in particular. Carey, get out your cane.

Another one I started to deeply miss was The Clash's self-titled on tape. Eventually my dear friend David found out about my folly with the shoebox. What was I thinking? So at some point into the 2010s, he gifted me a new-used copy! As well as a couple of other cassette tapes.

I never realized what precious jewels all those mixtapes would turn out to be. Stuff off the radio. Full-length copies of albums. The "be a radio DJ" set I got gifted one year at maybe 10 or 11 and then promptly recorded probably the most cringeworthy spoken word commentary over that radio-taped music, to be sure.

They gave us all these tools to be anything, and then they corralled us into boxes, medicated us, harangued us about all the pop culture things that built our world and helped us survive. Called us slackers and then hated us for wanting to be artists when we were the offspring of their hippie asses.

That other box of written secrets between me and my friends has vanished now, too. Did the diaries from all those ages get put in that box? Where did all of those parts of us go? Are they filling land somewhere now?

Regardless, they went to the garbage, and can't be retrieved now. A few other things, I know I lost in hard drive crashes. Maybe life phases out parts of who we are naturally, when needed. The me I used to know is polluting a landfill somewhere. And most of that is ok. I carried the threads that I needed with me, to the new person that was growing.

We weren't a Prozac Nation. We were a pop culture nation. These pillars of subculture were medicinal music for the masses.