Walkman

Aidan Vonderahe talks about his experience with music collecting in this brief personal essay.

I turned 20 in October of last year. The world is burning, so the cool fall air hadn’t swept through yet, but I still felt it. The chill of aging, outgrowing, losing. Losing years, memories, friends, family, pets... Life’s about the losses. I hate that. You give me something to love, I’ll hold onto it like it’s the only thing saving me from a drop into the pit of my certain demise. 

I think I first started having this feeling around sixth grade. I was raised Catholic, but I had fallen out of it. My sexual attraction to boys and my recently discovered love of internet pseudo-intellectuals had yanked the umbilical cord from me. I was swimming alone and hungry in this midwestern womb. 

Before then, I thought collecting stuff was stupid. Who cares how many Funko Pops you have? Nobody gives a shit about your anime figurines, your CDs, Beanie Babies, baseball cards, Pokemon cards, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, lots of cards. All of it, shit. But I kept seeing these large, flat squares appear in my sister’s room and on store shelves: The vinyl revival, in full swing. With Christmas swiftly approaching, I asked my parents for a record player and a couple of albums, which now I don’t much care for. The new (at the time) Black Keys, some Arctic Monkeys, an album of covers from A Perfect Circle, not really my speed. I hadn’t found that yet. I come from a decently privileged family, so they were able to get me invested in a hobby I would continue to find enjoyable throughout high school and my first couple semesters of college.

I would get records on birthdays, holidays, any time I felt brave enough to ask for one, or when I was given a little allowance. Before COVID hit, there was this place in my local mall, I think it was called “Hard Copies”. It was the first local record shop I had ever been to, and it became one of my favorite places in that mall. Band tees and hoodies hung from wall to wall; there were records, CDs, tapes and the like. But the pandemic came and their business wasn’t sustainable, so they shut down. In their place now sits a novelty custom apparel shop that allows you to get any design you want on a shirt. Their display features mannequins with Trump hats and pride shirts, and AR-15 decals next to Women’s March tees. 

I moved on. There were other stores that had been opened, so I started going to them. High school passed, college came, and I immediately became aware of just how expensive this hobby was. I started logging my collection on Discogs, which gives you an estimate of the value of your collection. Mine was about $2,000 on the low end, $10,000 on the high end. The numbers crept up, and when I got a job I realized it didn’t make sense to spend all my money on these big discs. Moving crates of records to and from Bloomington is a hell I don’t wish on my worst enemy, and I’ve done it multiple times now (it’s not really that bad, I’m just being dramatic). The weight, the cost, the fact that my record player wasn’t the greatest, it all caught up to me. I’ve thought about selling off large portions of my collection for a while but that’s still a summer project for me.

After a year in Bloomington, I began dating. Not like my high school dating, but dating dating. I put myself on dating apps for the first time at the beginning of the fall 2024 semester. I felt that I finally had enough pictures of myself doing cool shit that weren’t from high school, and that I needed some sort of romantic connection. These dates became another financial drain, in addition to my record collection. 

I met a girl. Our bond wasn’t romantic, instead it was more of a brief “friends with benefits” thing, in which I found myself at her apartment multiple times, and each time I was drawn to the same thing: her collection of cassette tapes. They were all in these cute, rectangular little boxes. I’d known about tapes from their importance in underground music scenes, particularly in metal, and from local bands selling their own but it always seemed like a door I could never open. I had a litany of excuses: the sound quality was worse, they didn’t last as long, and I didn’t have the proper equipment to actually listen to them (maybe litany is an extreme word to use, but those three reasons held the same weight as ten). So even when I saw a tape I might have wanted, I didn’t go for it. On my first date with my current girlfriend, we spotted a Death Grips cassette in a record store on Kirkwood, yet I neglected to buy it due to those aforementioned excuses. I’ve since gone back to retrieve it, keeping it from unworthy hands (I hope my sarcasm comes through clearly here).

Now, we’re back to where we were at the beginning of this rambling mess. I’m 20, feeling lost and ready to look for something to occupy my time. I’m back in my home town for Thanksgiving break and my grandmother reminds me that she never went birthday shopping with me. I like her system; go spend a day with your grandkid and buy them what they want instead of getting them goofy socks or something. The first thought on my mind was vinyl, since it’s what I’m used to shopping for, until we actually got in this old record store and again I was confronted with the squares.

Stacked up next to those overpriced antiques (I say with all the love in the world) were those same rectangular little boxes from that girl’s apartment. That was it. I started grabbing any tape I could find that I recognized or might have enjoyed. Donald Fagen, Led Zeppelin, Derek & The Dominoes, The Police. I didn’t even check to see if the tapes were inside the cases, I was so excited. I still had no way to listen to them, until I saw something hanging in the middle of the store.

It was a portable, battery powered radio/tape player. The rush that came over me was near indescribable, I felt like a kid in a candy store that only sold my favorite candy, and I could eat the whole lot without worrying about spoiling my dinner. I had a great day with my grandmother, and was excited to tell my parents about my new obsession when I got home.

They weren’t as happy as I was. My dad thought the whole thing was stupid, saying it was technology that was on its way out when he was in college. I told him I recognized that, but sometimes there’s no reasoning with the man. My mother didn’t really care one way or the other, but told me she didn’t understand it. She said she thought I was an audiophile, that my record collection was an attempt to get the best sonic experience. I told her this wasn’t true.

I couldn’t really think of any logical reason at the time I might have wanted to start collecting tapes. They were out of date, they were temporary, they didn’t sound great, but none of it mattered to me. I got the itch, the one that tells you to do shit without question or objection because it makes you feel good—pure id. I’ve only started questioning it now. Why do I enjoy collecting things just to do it?

I can’t say I have an answer, but I think it somehow connects me to the world in a way that is concrete. When I’m gone, nobody’s gonna look at my spotify account and try to sell it off or reminisce about the type of person I was. If a relative went through my belongings, I’d want them to find things they had no idea I’d been collecting: gnomes, old technology, tapes, records, ridiculous stuffed animals, art from local artists, jewelry, etc. It’s something to remember me by that I can touch, I can hold the music I love in my hands. It’s not up in some cloud somewhere being beamed down to me with alien technology, it’s in my own goddamn hands.

And as the lights dim ‘round the globe, the new winter rushes in, the children stop laughing, the traffic stops moving, the power grids fail, satellites crash, and cities fall, I can last on what batteries I have stockpiled and listen to my tapes. My tape player, my off-brand Walkman, will die too. I won’t be able to hear the music anymore, but I can still hold it in my hands. I can leave my smudges on its plastic case, I can squint at the faded album artwork, and I can remember.