The first time beat radio's Brian Sendrowitz sings, "I made you a mixtape/okay, it's not a tape at all", you believe him. It's a dead technology. Probably no one you know has made a real compliation tape in going on two decades, a memory that you, like me, might keep alive by calling CDs, even playlists or zip files sent to girls far away, "mixtapes", even if it means lying to the last three generations of music technology. But the second time Sendrowitz sings the same lyric, high fret board guitars wail behind him, adding a level of romance that shatters even our most artful compartmentalization of memory. Maybe it was a tape after all. This inexorable march, this race of new formats - vinyl killed by cassettes killed by CDs killed by mp3s killed by the Cloud happened in less than 30 years - is unstoppable. Sendrowitz just isn't having it, confessing a desire to explode this bullet back into the gun, to repack Pandora's box, maybe taking with it her Internet radio. The final lyric is the killer, "I was looking for something that can't be encoded in zeros and ones." Magnetic tape is no better than binary coded mp3s, but for Sendrowitz our feelings about music could stand to move forward by going back. We were no better or more earnest back then, but we remember it differently. For beat radio, we can be those remembered better people, even when you're downloading this song across the Internet wasteland.
Listen :: beat radio - "Teenage Anthem For The Drunken Boat"
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