Όλα Λάθος

Klon4.0

Before the internet crushed our spirit and warped us, hipsters used to collect bullshit like 8-track tapes just for the hell of it. There’s a guy in this doc that had Metal Machine Music on 8-track. Can you imagine? He wasn’t going to put it on eBay. He didn’t snap a pic for Instagram, then leave it at the thrift store and listen to it on Spotify. No, he LISTENED to the goddamned thing. IN HIS CAR!

mumblecorgi2.5

How many of you out there are old enough to remember actually playing 8-Track cassette cartridges? I might be one of the few of a dwindling caste of people who actually had to suffer through this experience, with its tape-eating machines, a "Fast Forward" function that was barely faster than "Play," and the big "CUNK-CUNK" you'd hear in-between "Programs." Do you even know what I'm saying? (Personal trivia: the first stereo I remember was my mother's Emerson receiver, which featured a phonograph, a cassette deck, AND an 8-Track player. I played her Saturday Night Fever 8-Track until the tape broke. I believe Walter Murphy's disco-fied "A Fifth of Beethoven" is the first song I recognized as "classical music" haha.) If not, this inelegant mid-1990s documentary might provide SOME insight. I say "some" because its main focus is on the outcasts in the 90s--a time when people were throwing away their vinyl records and replacing them with compact discs--who were looking for an even more forgettable and, frankly, weird medium--the 8-Track. These things, along with vinyl records, could be found by the bushel at any thrift store for a quarter or fifty cents. Hot commodities include any Stooges or Velvet Underground album, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and 8-Tracks produced in the late-1980s (when the last ones were officially mass produced, usually through “clubs" like "Columbia Music House"). By focusing so much on the collectors, who are frankly not that interesting, the documentary loses greater sight of the obsolescence of certain cultural artifacts and how nostalgia operates beyond the cache of an ironic sense of nostalgia. (I fall prey to this on occasion. I literally have eight 8-Track cassettes, which I will pick up from time to time, because they are so peculiar, clunky, sonically subpar, counterintuitive, and awkward as a media. Note: I have nothing to play them on. They are sheer decoration for me.) In other words, it never really delves that deep into its subject, merely skimming the surface. Now, I wish somebody would make a documentary like this, but about Capacitance Electronic Discs (CEDs). If you know what those are, you may be even older than I am!

pd1873.5

"you see something like this, and say, that came from another planet, and i say, no, that came from your home planet, earth"fun diy doc on 90s 8-track collectors who im sure are barely cooler than funko guys but since i was a kid back then i'll always wanna hang around em (see: SLACKER)bucks burnett the dallas record store guy shows up on joe bob's episode of BLOOD HARVEST telling tales from the entourage of tiny tim!