Is anybody else out there “I owned Millennium Hip-Hop Party ” years old? What a moment in time.
Ripping and burning CDs was becoming more common, but the hardware wasn’t guaranteed. MP3 players existed, but only found usage among early adopters. Y2K was the future, and Conan O’Brien was our prophet in what was to come “in the year 2000”.
We still bought playlists from Best Buy. Millennium Hip-Hop Party was the penultimate. Maybe in close competition with ESPN’s Jock Jams.
Then came mixtapes on CDs. Nero burned Millennium Dan Ott Party volumes one through 14 if I remember correctly. Volume 8 was the best. But it’s lost to time.
My computer no longer has an optical drive. Syncing MP3s to my iPod isn’t a thing. My iPod isn’t a thing. Shoot, it wasn’t a thing before the millennium came. A world changing device that is already a blip in the rear view mirror. It’s feature set tucked into a corner of my iPhone.
My Winamp library received hours of curation. It morphed into my iTunes library which now sits idle. Instead I pay rent to Spotify for the same music across all my devices—30-pin connector and time-spent-sync’ing free. The upside is I can share the nostalgia with you.
I don’t miss managing my music library. But I do miss remembering the names of songs. Maybe that’s more a function of the years lived than the tools passing through my hands.
Published: 2020-03-31