For The Record- 22. July. 2023

All the news that's fit to print, and some that probably isn't

Welcome to another edition of For The Record, a semi-regular good ol’ fashioned link drop, and benefit for paid supporters of On Repeat. The music world is many things, but “boring” is never one of them.

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This week, we’re going on a musical mystery tour, ranking Beastie Boys records and saying goodbye to a legend.

All of that and a lot more! Let’s get right into it.

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Last week, I talked about mixtapes' role in my life. Many of you responded with stories of your own: sharing music with friends, making the perfect tape for that special someone, etc. There were a lot of different reasons, but one of the overarching themes was music discovery. These tapes meant something not just because of the effort put into creating them but also because of the new favorites often found on them.

Today, finding a new song or figuring out who sang one is easier than ever if you’re stumped. Spotify gives you access to almost any song you want. Bandcamp fills in (almost) all of the rest. Hear a song in a restaurant that you can’t quite place? That’s what Shazam is for! This is obviously an amazing advancement in technology, and it would be disingenuous for me to rail against things I use more than I care to admit.

But there is also something to be said for having to work for it a little bit. For a good old-fashioned mystery. When was the last time anyone was genuinely stumped for more than a few minutes (or as long as it took to get back online)?

It could be maddening, but the sheer joy of solving a riddle made it worth it.

On my block, one of these lasted for over a week. One of my friends could only remember one line from a song (“I’ll give you anything¹”), and not knowing who it was was driving him bonkers. Remember, this was before the internet, before Shazam, and Google was still a mathematical function spelled Googol. You learned about it on field trips to OMSI.