Ah, the 80s and 90s—a time when you could experience radical culture shifts without the need for a fancy Ivy League education. A blissfully analog age when your biggest worries were whether your crush would notice your scrunchie matched your parachute pants and if you’d ever get through to your friend on the impossibly loud landline phone, which your mom insisted on using at the same time, ruining your chances of chatting up that cute neighbor. Yes, those were the days—an era of neon colors, cassette tapes, and questionable fashion choices that we proudly committed to memory, knowing full well that one day it would all come back around. Spoiler alert: it did, but not for the reasons we’d hoped.
Who could forget the intense drama of trying to download a single song on Napster? You essentially had to plan a whole Saturday around it. You’d click “download,” then walk away to have lunch, watch a few episodes of “Friends,” and maybe even build a time machine so you could go back and remind yourself that it wasn’t too late to invest in Blockbuster. In that brief, agonizing moment, you felt like you were one line of code away from discovering the world’s greatest secret—until you realized that you spent two hours downloading “Ice Ice Baby,” only to find out it was an awful 30-second ringtone version. Truly, a loss for the ages.
Let’s not forget the majesty of weekend plans that revolved around swapping tapes, where your entire social calendar could be built around “We’ll meet at the mall and have a chaotic trading session at the food court.” You’d show up with your Walkman, ready to barter like a kid pulling in the big leagues. It was a competitive sport, only overshadowed by the high stakes of deciding who’d get to use the CD player first. Oh, the thrill of nostalgia! I still miss pushing the “record” button at precisely the right moment to capture that one song the radio station might only play once an hour, only to have someone’s awkward voice come through and completely obliterate your mixtape dreams. There was nothing more powerful than the ephemeral joy of an unblemished mixtape that you could label “For Your Eyes Only.”
And don’t even get me started on the elegance of roller-skating rinks with their cheesy disco balls and music that was somehow both a total earworm and a blurry memory of an embarrassing crush. There you were, gliding—and by gliding, I mean wobbling and trying not to faceplant—on your roller skates while the DJ played “I Want It That Way” like it was the last song on Earth. And let’s be honest, it was—all of that euphoric weirdness of life before social media convinced us we had to document every minute. We didn’t tweet it; we lived it. Life was less about likes and more about looping your friends in when you eventually crashed headfirst into a wall. So raise your soda, my fellow Gen-Xers! Here’s to chasing the ghost of our past while watching our kids try to figure out the mysterious allure of dial-up—wait, never mind. They’ll never understand what it was like to hear that terrible screeching noise while waiting for a single web page to load. Shall we put it on a mixtape?