Life before the internet?!

  

    If you decide to learn music at age 20something, and drag your punk arse to a music school, you will, inevitably end up in a classroom consisting mainly of 10 year olds (if you are lucky, because there's alsways the 7 year olds' class as well, if you are as incompetent as me). On occasion though, you might get to find a teenager who is not as hyper as the rest, and you might find a secret ally who will help bridge the gap between terrified young adults (yours trully) and hyper-obnoxious young teens who think they are the hottest shit to ever walk the earth (they're not, I guarantee that. I used to be like them too, so I know).

    And this is how one nice Saturday evening you find yourself drinking coffee with a 15 year old and sharing your lights on violins, cellos, Nightwish, and why analog is better than digital. And it was somewhere between mp3 capacity and earphone quality that the dreaded question came up: "How the hell did you manage before internet?"

   Now, you will say, I am only in my early 20s, so I am quite the world wide web native. Truth is I have been acquainted with the interwebs since the late 90s, when as a little derp my father would load up educational games and comic strips to make sure the 4 year old knew how to spell weird words in english and could tell the difference between RAM and ROM. It was actually fun.

   But other than that, not much. By the time I was 12 the only computer in the house was my father's work laptop, and as for internet connection... I remember the dialing sound all too well. In my country in 2006, middle school kids would not normally have everyday access to a computer, let alone internet connection. Only the priviledged kids (read: the school's biggest bitch) would get her own computer, an internet connection, a facebook account, and a stack of Sims games. So what about songs? How did we get the song we wanted? How did we know the lyrics?!

    Oh the humanity.

    If you wanted a song, you would have to browse radio stations in hopes one of them would play it. If you were one of the lucky kids whose parents would be gone from the house for a long time every day, you might be able to tune in to a music TV channel and watch all the newest videoclips. Did you want to learn the name of that song? Cross your fingers and pray to any gods that may be the DJ would mention the name at the end of the song. It almost never happened for that song you wanted.
  And if you never knew the name of the song? Then stretch your ears and move around in circles, hoping to catch a few words in a row among the radio noise so you could start asking around. Then you would take that half finished lyric and go record store hopping: "Hi, I'm looking for that song, i don't really know the name of it, but it's a hard rock band, I think, with a male vocalist, they have a lot of guitar solos? The riff kinda goes like *enter half-arsed humming here*, and uhm, oh right he sings "diamonds in her eyes"and something about a "backseat"?... so you know it....no?" The girl at the big arse multimedia store downtown would look at you with an expression as if she had a stroke. But if you accidentally found a half forgotten second hand record store in a back street, that has been located in the same basement since the early 70s... half way through your mantra the owner would walk to the bins, shift through them, maybe disappear in the back, and then would present you with a record, which he would put on the Technics record player and MSG would fill the room. You found it!!!
    
   And lyrics? Ah.

   That's another painful story...

   Were you lucky? Was your radio deprived of noise? Then move through radio stations all day long looking for that particular song and try to learn the lyrics by heart, or write them down. The results were most always painfully hilarious. Then you could make copies of your horrible lyric interpretetions and sell them to the desperate kids in your school. And that is how 12 year olds acquire smoking funds. But what happens if the song is in a language other than the one you grew up speaking, and your foreign laguage skills are non-existent? Tough luck bro. Try to figure it out with the help of a dictionary. What's the word? ''obitchuary''? No? How could it be spelled...

   Or maybe you somehow ended up with an original CD instead of a copy? Or maybe you had an older sibling or cousins who have CDs? All hail the booklet gods, you could read the lyrics in their original, undistorted glory!

   "Why don't you just use your school lab computers to find the lyrics?"

   The whats in the school what? Did they even turn on? Did we even know how to use internet explorer, or google? "My dad has a yahoo! email, yahoo! is better, look it up there" "Which one do I click?" "NOOOO NOT THAT ONE YOU ARE GOING TO GET A VIRUS!!!"

   And if you actually wanted to be able to listen to the song outside radio availability time? Oh boy. Buckle up your seatbelts and get ready cause this one is going to blow the hairs right off your priviledged skull.

   Do you have a cassette radio player? Good. Record that song on a fucking cassette, and hope you get the best sound quality, the DJ doesn't talk, the previous and next song don't play on top of it, and you manage to get the whole of it. Your whole life from now depends on cassettes, much like a caveman. Doesn't matter how cool you are for having this song to listen to anytime you wanted, your classmates would make relentless fun of you for not using CDs. Unless you were lucky and your parents knew someone who could convert cassettes to CD. I was not. 

   Unable to record off the radio? Then brace yourself and bow your head and beg (literally beg) your older sibling/cousin/schoolamte/friend's sibling/cousin/'s schoolmate to help you get a copy of it. And what are you willing to give in return? How about the Mystic Elf Yu-Gi-Oh! card? Or that really rare pokemon tap... Honestly, you would have cried less if you were to surrender all your birthday pocket money. But it was worth it. Sometimes.

   Then there was also the horribly abusive, lying, spoiled piece of shit brat that you dreaded playdates with and often got violently sick at the mere thought of having to interact with, but her family was really high-tech and never refused to download songs for you, burn them on a CD, and give it to you...only that you needed one playdate to get the songs you wanted, and another one to get the CD given to you, which often included extra tracks scattered throughout the playlist of things she liked and you hated, mainly by horrible one-off female ''singers'' or boybands. Truth be told, this was an excelent plan to get more playdates for their obnoxious daughter who once stuffed a dead mouse down my pants. No wonder I have issues.

   Yup, those were the days.... boy do I wish things were as simple as back then!






   Ok I'm lying. It was pretty fun back then.