I still have a ton of my old cassettes from my high school days and just recently, I found my Sony Walkman (which still works.) I had a boombox, but most of my music came from my Walkman. Thanks to Columbia House and BMG in the early/mid-90s, I also started a compact disc collection like most people at the time…paying two cents for my first 24 discs (and God knows what for the next 24.) Sony had graduated to the Discman by this time and also gave me the universal problem of fooling with those stupid cassette adapters for your car stereo. I still preferred cassettes and mainly littered my car with them for local driving and left the cassette adapter for long trips.
I decided to rummage through the boxes in my garage and pick out 12 actual cassettes from my collection for this list. There are a few cassettes that I’ll have to list the whole album because I couldn’t possibly choose one song. I owned many cassette singles or “cassingles” as well which worked well if you had auto reverse on your player. Here are my high school favorites from the years 1991-94:
INXS Kick & Welcome to Wherever You Are
These two albums are probably the ones I remember jamming to the most when I was just getting from here to there around town. I could listen to them both all the way through, but there were certain songs that could hit me at any moment resulting in a rewind. So many good songs on Kick including probably my favorite track “New Sensation” and the windshield crooner “Never Tear Us Apart.” The one I probably rewound the most was “Need You Tonight/Mediate” because I would try to memorize all the “ates” at the end of the combined tracks. I definitely spent more time on side one of the WTWYA album. From “Heaven Sent” to “Not Enough Time” were my favorite tracks, but occasional I flipped the tape to side two to listen to “Beautiful Girl.”
Phil Collins Both Sides
This album was always with me…the car, my room, basketball bus trips, everywhere. It came out my senior year and always think of that time when I hear the title track. I think its highly underrated when talking about Phil’s discography. I went through a case of the high school blues after I graduated and used numerous tracks like “Can’t Turn Back The Years,” “Everyday,” and “I’ve Forgotten Everything” to get me through. Also got the opportunity to see Phil live at Hershey, PA after I graduated in the summer of ’94 and still remains as one of my favorite concert experiences.
Van Halen 1984
Love every track on 1984. My steering wheel frequently became a guitar listening to this tape, but for the most part I remember playing more air drums. I can probably pop this tape in now and remember about 90% of the cymbal smashes by Alex Van Halen. I also remember this album being surprisingly good background music when playing Bulls vs Lakers on Sega Genesis.
Beck “Loser”
Tone Loc – “Funky Cold Medina”
Prince “Batdance“
ZZ Top Greatest Hits
Radiohead “Creep”
EMF “Unbelieveable“
Sting “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You”
Crash Test Dummies “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”
Most would probably agree that our musical taste is developed in our teenage and high school years. Guess with this list you can see that I had a whole menu of flavors which still rings true today.
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