#1: The mixtapes

Spotify has made us pay for music. It’s made us legally download and pay for it. But it’s not just about the money and the legality. I often ask myself how we managed to enjoy and discover music in the 90s. This is the first in a series of articles about changes in technology between my childhood in the 80s and the current days.

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, a car sped past with its hi-fi blasting at full volume. We stopped our Sunday morning promenade and looked at each another in awe. “What the hell was that?”, our eyes were saying. We hadn’t managed to listen to much of the song, except for a few lyrics we had never heard before: “Oh mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia let me go”.

That precarious glimpse of Queen marked an interesting discovery in my growing up: the existence of some quirky type of music, listening to which makes you cool. Followed by the intense desire of “owning” it, so that you can listen to it whenever you wish. To our untrained ears, the combination of a verse like “mamma mia let me go” with opera-like music, sounded like an outstanding piss-take. We had no idea what the song was, who the singers were, but we thought the driver was clearly very cool. Before that moment, my friends and I had never quite discussed how to procure music. This episode changed it. We decided we had to find out which song it was.