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My Six-Year-Old Wasn’t That Into Music and it Worried Me a Little
Then He Discovered Vinyl
I grew up in Western Europe during the Cold War, something that is starting to be more and more fun to say. At the end of 2023, my son is six-and-a-half years old. I am lucky and grateful for having grown up in the time that I did. In the decades before the Internet many magical technological things were happening in the capitalist world that kept kids and adults engaged, busy and interested. Tape (reel-to-reel and cassette), slides, film, automatic photography and typewriters, super 8 video, amateur radio, over-the-air analog television, AM/FM radio, amateur radio, CB radio, Rubik’s cube, you name it. Our toys were cool! I was six in 1973 and became fascinated with anything “digital.”
For me, the digital revolution came in the form of simple pocket calculators of the Teal Photon kind, and soon after that came digital wrist watches, long before CDs, which were commercialized in 1982. By the time calculators started getting really interesting, I was already not into mathematics anymore. The tracked high school system majorly backfired on me at age 14. I remember owning a late ‘70s/early ’80s version of a solar powered Taiwanese knock-off of a TI or a Casio that came in a cheap, plastic folder thingy. In those days, lots of things I owned said “Made in Taiwan” on them, but those days are long gone. The watches were cool, though. Anything that would even remotely resemble the Seiko Quartz LC 0624–5009 LCD was good enough for me.
My father got his hands on a knock-off Pulsar early on and gave it to me as a gift. He often got his hands on interesting gadgets, though I had no idea where they came from, as it wasn’t exactly clear to me what my dad did for a living. We were poor (I wasn’t really aware of this until high school) and we lived in a very small rural village where we were out of place, because we weren’t from there. We were, in a very local way, pioneers from abroad and thus our family was somewhat ostracized by that community, something which thankfully improved over time, as some form of gentrification entered the fray that was my childhood. To my teacher and classmates I was told to say my dad was a “business man.” He wasn’t, and that’s a different story, but the point is he often had access to unusual things and…
