COOL! Look at my new toy:
my new toy
This is a Crosley Revolution portable turntable. I just picked it up at Urban Outfitters on sale for $50. Don’t ask my why I went in there in the first place but some faker-hipster’s loss is my gain, I guess. As I put some finishing touches on the private reading script for Shotgun Wedding: The Musical, I get to listen to some good music — 90s style! On vinyl!
In 1993, Toronto didn’t really have a radio station where you could listen to Ralph Tresvant, Hi-Five and Xscape whenever you wanted to. What’s a teenage boy from Mississauga to do when he gets a hankering to dedicate “With You” by Tony Terry to that girl from Mt. Carmel? (anonymously, of course *shakes head*)
Sure, we had Energy 108 and sometimes they played r&b… and you could get your Hip Hop fix with The Power Move on 88.1… and then Soul In The City, X-Tendamix, Electric Circus sometimes. The best was WBLK coming out of Buffalo but that was always scratchy and you had to spend some time adjusting the rabbit ears. If you were lucky enough to get reception, you could listen to “The Quiet Storm” late at night with all those slow jams…. ah.
Fast forward on to about 2000 or so and Toronto gets its own black radio station: FLOW 93.5 (hey, PERFECT for us Filipino kids!). The early days of Flow were the best because there was an old school show, a soca show and live to air right from the club. My personal favourite was from 10pm to midnight (I think):The Love Zone with Geena Lee
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Remember when it was all about the MIXTAPE? I mean mix TAPE. Not mixtape MP3 download or mix-CD. I mean cassette!
Rolling the tape back with a pencil in one of the holes, putting tape or paper over the tab so you could tape over it again and taping songs from the radio when you couldn’t afford to buy it, then the damn DJ talks over it! GRRRR!
Do you remember the brands? Memorex, Maxell and if you were lucky you got Sony. But the real king of cassettes were TDKs (not to mention the corporate sponsor of Ben Johnson, still fastest man on earth – according the Maestro anyway). Mixtapes were our way of showing that we “liked” someone else — but that was just a sub-genre of what we used these mix cassettes for.
Nas was around in 1993 and this short film for TDK is his ode to the cassette:
