Requiem for a Walkman

My big birthday present this year was an iPod. I suppose this isn't anything significant to most people considering that the iPod has been the predominant portable music device for the better part of a decade and that very few people even buy CDs anymore. But for me it's a pretty big deal. You see, I still own a Walkman.

Granted, in recent years I have only used the Walkman when I was working out and my newest mix tape is something on the order of three or four years old, but with the acquisition of an iPod, I'm truly at the end of a very long era in my life. Since I was in elementary school, I've always had something to take with me that played music. My very first music device was an Emerson "tape recorder," the type that was a huge rectangle that took a full-sized cassette and that you'd often see on 1980s cop shows during interrogation scenes. I recorded a lot of stupid stuff on it and listened to a lot of those "read the story/hear the book" books (my favorite of which was one about Superman because it was a full-sized hardcover book and not some cheapo paperback, which is what I had for Return of the Jedi).

My first Walkman was one I commandeered from my parents. I'd place its origins in the mid-1980s, as it had the classic headphones that went over the head and two foam-covered speakers that went over the ears. This was the Walkman I took with me on school field trips and tuned people out with by listening to tapes I'd made by taping songs off of the radio, which is why you'd get a deejay talking over the first few seconds of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" or why there was static during the bridge of INXS's "Devil Inside." Sadly, this is something the current generation will not have the pleasure of dealing with.

In the years since I had several Walkmen, not all of them technically of the "Walkman" brand, and all of them had different features and suffered various fates. There was the one with equalizers on the face and a digital display that a family friend accidentally dropped in the Great South Bay one summer afternoon; there was the one I chucked across the room when I was fifteen, pissed off about ... well, something; there were ones with bass boost, hold buttons, AM/FM transmitters, carrying cases, and ear buds. There were also the quirks that each machine had -- a tendency to sometimes play tapes too slow or eat them; a crackling sound when the earphone jack became aged; or, how, when my current Walkman would switch sides on the tape, one of the speakers would cut out and I would have to take the tape out, flip it over, and press play again.

It seemed that as the cassette tape became more and more obsolete, the manufacturers did what they could to make the Walkman appealing. I'm not surprised that the Walkman held out pretty well against the Discman, considering that early models of the Discman were notorious for breaking easily or couldn't handle actually being carried--my sister was always combatting with CD skipping. But when the iPod with its colorful commercials set to "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" began to take hold, that was the final nail in the coffin.

Still, I held out for a while. Partly because I didn't have a computer that had the capacity for maximum iPod-ness and partly because the Walkman--more importantly, the tapes it played--was a pretty important figure in my life and I wasn't just ready to throw away that particular velveteen rabbit. I still have three shoeboxes full of tapes that I've got to decide what to do with. Some are albums that I have yet to replace with CDs, mostly 1980s-era Queen and a few things, like the soundtrack to The Big Chill, that were pilfered from my parents when I was back in high school (I did let my dad keep his collection of Kenny Rogers tapes as well as Exile's Greatest Hits); most of them are mix tapes, which provided some sort of unofficial soundtrack to my adolesence. I don't think that my trip to Europe when I was 17 would have been half as fun without a steady diet of Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Jane's Addiction, and Metallica (in fact, I think I wound up giving one of my Metallica tapes to a girl); walks home from high school would have been way more boring without Billy Joel.

And I've already written quite a bit about about college room soundtracks and mixtapes for girlfriends.

The Walkman isn't in the trash just yet -- it's sitting in one of the trays of our treadmill -- but I've already gone full-tilt into the iPod, making playlists, buying songs, and listening to a few podcasts while I clean and do some work here and there (btw, I totally understand why my students want to listen to them instead of me in class ... though I wish they had better taste in music than T.I.). The tapes are still in the closet and while I will definitely purge them, I think I might take a look at what's actually on those tapes and maybe transfer some of that stuff to CD (or buy the songs). The machine will probably meet its demise soon after. So in a way, this is "farewell, my lovely," though I'm sure you'll have a legacy.