Mixtapes

Memorex. BASF. Maxell.

These were familiar brands to Gen X kids interested in music. They provided us with the tools of our trade—the blank cassette. Blank tapes were the iPod and iTunes of the 80s and early 90s.

If you wanted to copy an album so that you could listen to it anywhere else at all, you generally had to use a blank tape. It didn’t matter if it was an album (vinyl record), a CD, or another tape: if you wanted to make a copy of an album, the way to do it was to play the album and hit record on the tape deck.

Copying albums was useful if your friend had something you wanted to listen to, and you might have a portable tape player in your car and want to listen to something you had on vinyl. A $1 blank tape was a lot cheaper than buying the original tape at the record store for like $10.

Beyond expanding my album collection, there was another really good reason to own lots of blank cassettes: mixtapes. Blank tapes became the canvas for your creations, and you could create a ta…