I'll Be Missing You, After September, I'll Be Wanting You, So Always Remember, How I Loved You Girl, After The Summer's Gone

--"After the Summer's Gone", PC Quest

Last week Brandy sent me a gift I didn't know I had coming. I received a copy of PC Quest's self-titled album which was originally produced in 1991. It didn't cost her a lot--I think she bought off Ebay for less than five dollars--and I doubt to anyone else it would hold as much meaning does for me. The songs are all outdated, way too poppy, and probably are as saccharine sweet as any songs that have ever been played anywhere. I'm fairly sure almost anyone else would have filed the cassette away somewhere and never thought twice about it.

However, I'm not exaggerating when I say it's probably the most thoughtful gift I've received all year.


I can tell you that life isn't fair
But I still can't tell you why

Yes, there's a certain nostalgia associated the album. I still remember listening to almost all these songs on a certain trip up to visit my aunt in Bakersfield. I remember making a fool of myself in front of my family by listening to this innocuous little cassette through my headphones and belting each song loudly. It didn't matter to me that nobody cared for my singing and it mattered even less that the lyrics were far from being socially relevant. I liked the music. I liked how simple and infectious they all seemed to be. It was a perfect album in the sense there was not one song I wanted to skip over. I don't know--it could have been any album, but for some reason I found something universal within the ten songs contained on the album. On that certain trip on that certain day I just didn't care that I was the butt of my family's jokes. It's not often you find your bliss in something small and I sure wasn't about to let the moment pass me by.

Then, later on, I remember Raoul Bustamante asking me in high school where I'd heard of PC Quest. Apparently, that album had brought him a moment's joy a few years back too. It was the first time I thought an album I considered a guilty pleasure was somebody else's too.

So, yeah, the gift's merits does involve the actual quality of the material. PC Quest was a highly underrated band and I consider that first album one of the things proudest to have ever owned (twice now, I guess).

But for me the real value of the product and what makes it the most thoughtful of presents is the fact you can't even get the album on CD. It was never translated over. Their second album was, but never this one. That's where this album becomes special. Because--I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, but I'm sure someone has--I not only remember the music. I also remember having to play cassettes. I remember having to flip over this particular tape to listen to the B-side when there were actually B-sides to albums or tapes. I remember how fun it used to be to try and guess where a particular song was just about to begin simply by estimating how long I had fast forwarded or rewound. There's a whole set of circumstances, associations, memories, and feelings that are attached to this one cassette. It really was the jewel of a vast collection of cassettes I had before the advent of CDs and it makes me long for that time when people didn't have such easy access to all the music they wanted with a few simple keystrokes.

Back when I started listening to music, I used to have to wait however long it took me to get down to the local Wherehouse to buy an album. Plus, I never really got to sample an album before I bought it. If I was lucky, I heard one song on the radio before I took a chance on the new album. It was more of a hit-or-miss proposition. Sometimes you got lucky and the whole album was as good as that first hit single, but most of the time it wasn't. That's what finding albums like PC Quest's such a gold mine. It really was rare to find an album that rocked from stem to stern. Sure, you could buy singles if you really wanted, but it didn't match the access to buying songs individually from Itunes like we have now. You really had to commit to a band almost like a blind date when you bought their album. That's a faith that I'm afraid people never get experience these days, when an album leaks three or four weeks before its official release.

I know cassettes are obsolete now. They don't even hold the collector's value that vinyl has. They've been relegated to the back bin of a couple of vintage music shops and marked down to ridiculously low prices.

But I still recall when cassettes were the bulk of my music collection and I recall what owning a collection of cassettes meant. It meant that I had assembled through trial and error a sampling of music I was proud to own. Rather than search for music I already knew I liked, I was compelled by the circumstances to venture out from my safety zone and listen to artists I had no idea if I was going to like. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that we can make playlists and burn compilations of groups we know backwards and forwards. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that we can separate the wheat from the chaff and only listen to those particular songs we like, that we don't have to listen to the whole album like I used to enjoy. Yes, I know you could still fast forward or rewind through songs back then too. I just know I seem to catch myself skipping to the next track more now, when it doesn't involve having to wait the twenty or thirty seconds it took to search out that next song.

That's what makes me sad. That with all this convenience I think we've done away with the ability to taking pleasure in something different than what we're used to. I think we've done away with some of our patience, our tolerance, our endurance for that which we're not comfortable. I'm not saying it's all CDs, Ipods, and Mp3's fault--but it is a sign of the times that we really can surround ourselves in a bubble of songs, movies, even people we know we already like. If we wanted to, we could go our whole lives never having to find new music, new movies, or new people. When you can call up at a moment's notice everything you already like, what need is there for taking the time to find out that next thing you might like.

That's what this cassette represents, my desire to revel in the obsolete. If I can still smile at a tape that I probably haven't owned in over eleven years, that can never be downloaded to my Itunes library, that would take some doing to burn to a CD, then I can still smile at the fact I have still have some use for that which I'm not familiar with.

I guess I feel that I'm already becoming obsolete and it gives me some kind of comfort that after my summer's gone there's hope that somebody still want me around, you know?

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers