Patrick Simpson

In an interesting attempt to use the Walkman’s 30th birthday to promote bullying, the BBC has given 13-year-old Scott Campbell a Walkman for a week instead of his regular iPod. As Scott does not have an interest in modern history, nor a page in the BBC magazine to fill, he is understandably not very impressed by this device that is bigger, heavier, uglier and less convenient. Or, as he puts it: “Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?”

Despite being the same age as the Walkman – but in human years 30 is still young, right? Right? – I clearly remember the pre-Walkman era. Or at least the time before I had a Walkman, which must have been first ten years of my life. Before the Walkman, the only choice for music in public spaces – short of actually listening to music played in public spaces, which was only invented during my teen years – was the ghetto blaster. One of the problems with that was that it was designed to play music loudly, which caused people – invariably old, at least 30 – to complain. Back when I was young, we had to listen to adults, because we did not have weapons. And adults were so much bigger then than they seem to be today.

Adults were just one of the problems. Scott has clearly never seen “Do the Right Thing,” so he does not appreciate the amount of money required to keep the ghetto blaster in batteries, nor the amount of racial tension caused by Spike Lee (who is apparently 52 now. Fuck. I felt so much younger 10 minutes ago)  When I was young, money was a problem, because we did not have the internet to sell our pornography on. We had to put that on video tapes and gambled on V2000, which is like an HD DVD, but is harder to use for creative Christmas cards.

To make a long ramble short, yes, Scott, we were bloody impressed with the Walkman. Never mind that it could only play 90 minutes of music. We had to buy our music back then, so nobody owned 90 minutes of music. Again, we didn’t have money back then, because our drug dealing was severely hindered by the opium wars. Sure, flipping over the tape after 45 minutes was a pain, but then auto reverse was introduced and that problem was solved. And with long play, we could enjoy 180 minutes on a single casette. 180 minutes of low-quality audio! That was twice the mix tape on a single casette!

And you know what was even better than the Walkman? The Discman! I bought my first Discman with money I made delivering newspapers, because back then children were forced to perform manual labour. A newspaper is like a printout of an RSS feed. The Discman had higher quality audio. At most 60 minutes on one CD. Which you couldn’t download or copy. And when you walked too fast, the CD would skip. Ah yes, the Discman was awesome!

At some point the MP3 player was introduced. Was I impressed? No. I was bloody awestruck! Megabytes of space and hours of battery life. No skipping, no breaking tapes; it just worked. In retrospect the Walkman and Discman were complete pieces of crap, like everything about my childhood. The MSX and Commodore 64? Absolutely bloody useless. We had to suck up to people who owned a NES. An 8-bit Nintendo! Have you ever seen 8-bit graphics? No? Just push your face up against your widescreen HD televison until your nose starts to bleed. That’s 16-bit graphics. For 8-bit graphics, get someone to push your head in even deeper.  When the screen has broken and a shard of glass is stuck in both your eyes, you’ll appreciate how much we enjoyed to original Super Mario Bros. And that was so much better than Pong. To make things worse, all the cool games were only available in Japan, on something called the Famicon. That was just a NES, but we didn’t know; we didn’t have the internet. And we didn’t have MSN Messenger, we had party lines. They sucked, but were so expensive that we were not allowed to use them, so we had to try them anyway and got in trouble because the itemised phone bill had just been introduced.

To summarise, Scott, our childhoods sucked. Sometimes we had so little to do, we would go outside to “play”. Have you ever tried playing, Scott? It sucks beyond believe. There is no global ranking, there’s always some little dick making up new rules just when you’re winning and you parents complain when you come back covered in dirt. Parents complained to us, Scott. About everything we did. We were not even allowed to listen to our Walkman when there was family visiting, because that was anti-social. Of course it was anti-social, that was the point. When I was young, we had to fight to be anti-social. We blazed the trail for you, Scott. Without us, you would never have been allowed to listen to your iPod everywhere you go. So the least you can do is stop being so bloody anti-social and stop listening to your iPod everywhere you go. And stop rubbing our sorry noses in it. THE WALKMAN WAS BLOODY AWESOME!