newsgroup: alt.collecting.8-track-tapes

You don't have to be obsessed with old, cheesy music to join in alt.collecting.8-track-tapes, but it helps. It's no big surprise that when you find people with 8-track lust, you also find a lot of people who are hot and sweaty for the '70s, the heyday of 8-track mania. Collectors buy, sell and trade all your basic '70s heavyweights: David Cassidy, the Monkees, Mick Ronson, the Bee Gees. The place reeks of those weird open-air markets you find in Marrakech and Bangkok, where ancient American pop blares over a car stereo someone hacked from a dead Buick and set up over his stall. In fact, that kind of hardware often comes up in the group. 8-track junkies happily and freely dispense advice on preserving and repairing old tapes and hardware (those slowly tarnishing players with quaint names like Muntz that some of us remember as being state-of-the-art, then junk, and now collector's items). And that's part of the fascination of alt.collecting.8-track-tapes. The place is a nostalgia trip for some, a brave new world for others, kitsch heaven for still others. It's sort of a cultural Rorschach test: what do 8-tracks mean to you? -R.K.

Subject: audio-video, music

Geography: global

Format: newsgroup

Language: English

Cost: no cost