Introduction

Just about anyone who has ever met me can vouch for how passionate I am about music. It's often one of the things I'm most commonly associated with whenever folks describe or mention me. I have another blog, Hectic But Eclectic, which delves into that passion along with other media, but this blog will serve an entirely different purpose. While I will still run Hectic But Eclectic and focus on more current developments, Mixed Reaction will take a look back.

Music video channels such as MTV, BET and The Box deserve a lot of credit for opening me up to different genres as a child and furthering a growing passion, but it wasn't until I got my own cassette radio that things were taken to a new level. The beauty of radio was not only the bounty of stations that I could switch between; it was also the exposure to songs that couldn't afford Spike Jonze as a video director or didn't even have a video, a world I had been ignorant to previously on the rock side of things. Since my parents enforced a strict bedtime curfew, my music addiction would end promptly at 9:00 PM, but now as I went to sIeep, I could let the radio softly fill my room with music at a volume just low enough to not disturb my family through the night. I had an alarm clock radio before my cassette player, but the fact that I could use my new device to play entire albums instilled a sense of independence and pride that I never had with my previous radio. I was no longer at the mercy of anyone's taste and I was well on my way to paving my own musical path.

Out of all the ways that my cassette player made life wonderful, there was nothing more magnificent than recording songs from the radio. My passion for music was already incredibly strong at this point. I had spent entire summer days watching nothing but MTV and BET and most moments home alone were spent with me rifling through my stepsister and stepmother's CD collections or sometimes staring at my father's vinyl library. I could only gaze at the album covers since I didn't know how to work the stereo to the record player and was much too afraid to tinker with something I didn't know how to operate. Recording songs off the radio allowed me to become more intimate with music in a way I wasn't able to before. No longer did I have to wait for my favorite song to come on: I could just pop in a tape and press play.

For Mixed Reaction, I'll start by returning to the makeshift mixtapes of my youth and follow the progress through the years as my methods became more sophisticated. I've managed to hold on to all of them and thought that such dedication would be a good insight into the origins of a passion. Expect weekly posts every Tuesday and feel free to share this with anyone who you'd think might find this interesting. Hope you'll enjoy!