Comparisons are Odorous

A long time ago, I began to take a serious interest in music; that is, listening to it, singing along with it, and indulging in fantasies about being a musician. I was about 8 years old when Nickelodeon started running old episodes of The Monkees (a sitcom featuring a prefabricated band about the misadventures of a fictional version of said prefabricated band), and I just loved it. I didn’t own any Monkees records, and had no means of going and purchasing any, and it never really occurred to me that one could buy a Monkees record; I think I assumed they simply didn’t exist for some reason. I mean, I was 8.

So to satisfy this need, I took what was already at the time a gravely outdated cassette recorder, and when The Monkees aired on cable, I held the device up to the TV and hit record when a song played on the show. I did this over the course of a few episodes and soon had a decent collection of Monkees songs on my crappy little tape deck with a single mono speaker-not that this mattered, because of course I was recording from the TV’s speaker. I listened to it all the time.

When my dad realized I had been doing this, he said, “You know, we can buy you a Monkees tape.” That was really nice of him, but in my 8-year-old brain, it was kind of silly. I already had all the songs, dad!

I did eventually acquire The Monkees’ Greatest Hits on audio cassette, and I was very glad to have it. The songs were way longer on the album than on the TV show! The theme song even had a second verse! And there were a bunch of songs that weren’t even on the show! And wow, “Listen to the Band,” that one was weird!

While I also noticed that I could hear more of the instrumentation on the album than on my tape of TV audio, it wasn’t all that much different to me. I mean, it was still the same crummy old tape deck with the mono speaker. It didn’t seem crummy at all to me, as I had little to compare it to. So it was fine! When I eventually got other tapes-”Weird Al” Yankovic, the soundtracks to Ghostbusters and Transformers: The Movie, and so on-it was the same. I was just happy to have them.

I wasn’t done recording music straight from the TV, either. Over the next couple of years I would also start recording music from my video games (good lord did I love the music from Mega Man II), other kinds of music I…