Eight-tracks charted dreams
Now let uspraise the eight-track
tape.
This is no nostalgia piece
from another aging undergrad, no luke
warm yearning for a bygone era. I’m
quite serious when I say the eight
track changed the world.
Here’s what happened:
Music, formerly available only on
the cumbersome vinyl disks that our
children will not recognize, became
suddenly portable. The car stereo came
into being.
The eight-track offered freedom of
c hoice unavail able pre v iously and lead
to the invention of the “boom box.”
The boom box made it possible to
carry your music with you — to the
park, to school parking lots and out
door parties.
You could share it with your friends
and aggravate passersby.
Parks and other open publ ic spaces
were immediately taken overby kids
with their boom boxes. The burgeon
ing youth culture was about to ex
plode.
It hardly matters what music they
actually played — I said this was no
nostalgia trip — so long as it was
popular with the kids.
And here we come to the best
feature of the eight-track: Its con
struction.
If there was ever a time when
McLuhan was right on, it was now:
With the eight-track, the medium re
ally was the message.
The eight-track was a cheap plas
tic housing containing a tape loop.
The eight-tracks of the tape were
the left and right channel of four song
tracks running parallel along the loop.
What that means is that the eight
track, once plugged in, could be played
over and over without pause until the
tape literally wore out.
Want to hear “Led Zeppelin IV”
20, 30, 40 times straight through?
Plug her in and let her run.
You could let your favorite album
run through your dreams as it played
all night, unattended.
Today, as a young friend of mine
points out, one can program certain
CD players to repeat even a particular
song or set of songs in a pre-selected
A whole generation of kids
became a species of “lucid
dreamers” as they learned to
navigate and control their altered
states of consciousness brought
on by music.
order.
One can even choose songs from
different CDs to play in endless repe
tition.
But the eight-track was the first to
offer the repeat feature for entire al
bums, and in many ways this makes it
more important.
Even if it did not, there was another
feature of the eight-track that many
people don’t even remember: the
channel change.
Because the four song tracks ran
side by side instead of end to end —
they had to, to make the loop small
enough to be viable — some means
had to be devised to change the chan
nel.
They must’ve used some mechan
ical means to actually shift the tape or
the head, because there was an audi
ble “CLICK diClack” as the channels
changed.
Mostly this happened between
songs — though the producers of the
tapes didn’t seem to put a lot of effort
into making sure it did.
But for the longer songs of album
oriented rock groups like Rush and
Jethro Tull, arranging the tape to ac
commodate the music just wasn’t
practical.
Often the last few notes or even
bars would be repeated on the other
side of the channel change, as a kind
of propitiation for having interrupted
the song.
These two features — the endless
repeatability of an entire album and
the interruption of the music by the
channel change — made the eight
track medium entirely different expe
rience from the same music on a
record.
Hearing a record of the music with
which was one of the most famil iar or
the eight-track format could be disori
enting.
Your ear missed the channel change
— and the abrupt end of the music at
the end of a side could be jarring.
You’d gotten used to hearing it —
not only all the way through, but
several times through.
This is what I think:
Music is like a dream. One easily
slips into an altered state of con
sciousness, like a dream state, listen
ing to music — particularly the psy
chedelic music of the era, though any
era’s music works as well.
The CLICK diClack of the channel
change, the first time you heard it in
the middle of a Neil Peart drum solo,
woke you up, momentarily, from the
dream.
If listening to music induces a
dream state, listening to the same
musical series endlessly repeated does
something far more obvious.
And every time there is the CLICK
diClack there to wake you up—until,
that is, it becomes part of the music for
you.
A whole generation of kids be
came a species of “lucid dreamers” as
they learned to navigate and control
their altered states of consciousness
brought on by music.
They became experts in hypnotic
trance, without ever really knowing
that was what they were.
So when LSD and marijuana be
came readily available on the street,
there was a whole generation that was
ready to take that next step — glory
hallelujah! — into the still uncharted
terrain of human consciousness.
Baldridge Is a senior English major, a
Daily Nebraskan arts and entertainment se
nior reporter and a columnist.
Illegitimacy may bring downfall
Throughout human history, the
great empires — Rome, Brit
ain, the U.S.S.R. — all col
lapsed from an inner social rot. Should
present trends continue, the United
States may become the latest casual
ty. The reason? Illegitimacy.
Only 18 months ago, Vice Presi
dent Dan Quayle decried the societal
rejection of traditional norms and
values. One sentence, though, aroused
the ire of the liberal media and cultur
al elite, when Quayle criticized TV’s
“Murphy Brown.” All else was lost in
the uproar. The Democrats belittled
“family values” throughout the ’92
election.
Fast forward to last week. Presi
dent Clinton now talks about strength
ening families, sounding suspicious
ly like Quayle. His aides and Cabinet
members wring their hands publicly
over the rising tide of illegitimacy.
All of a sudden, the very “family,
values” ridiculed a year previously
are now very much in vogue. It re
mains to be seen whether this is a
smokescreen, another attempt by the
most leftist president this century to
mask himself as a conservative.
Some numbers begin to tell the
story, cause and effect:
• Teen pregnancy rates doubled
from 1972 to 1990.
• B irths to unmarried women were
5 percent of all births in 1960; they
were 28 percent in 1990.
• Divorce rates doubled from 1960
to 1990 as marriage rates fell from 74
to 54 per 1,000 in the same period.
• Violent crime jumped from
250,000 in 1960 to 2 million in 1990;
the overall crime rate quadrupled.
• Juvenile crime arrests rose from
**150 to 425 per 1,000 from 1960 to
1990.
•The number ofchildrcn on Aid to
Families with Dependent Children
quadrupled; child poverty has been
on the rise since 1970; and single
parent families have gone from 9 per
It used to be fairly simple when a
girl got pregnant — they got
married. Now, they get welfare.
cent of all families in 1960 to 27
percent.
The bottom line here is that single
motherhood has become easier than
ever, fed by an increasing lack of
stigma from society. Illegitimacy,
which approaches 80 percent in some
black areas, is now creeping into low
er-income white areas as well, where
half of all births now are out of wed
lock.
Fed by an increasingly voracious
welfare state, single motherhood has
become acceptable in many areas, a
way for some girls to get attention and
earn that most valued commodity in
schools today, self-esteem. What all
the defenders of single motherhood
overlook is that a single woman with
children has never been a viable eco
nomic unit in society. When a welfare
check replaces a working father, the
result is a horde of aggressive, irre
sponsible young men roaming the
streets, hyped on drugs and packing
MAC-10s.
How to solve this problem? Soci
ologist Charles Murray proposes rc
stigmatization, that society make hav
ing a child out of wedlock cost. Make
the mother, her parents or the father
and his parents responsible for the
care of the child, since Murray would
el iminatc all welfare payments to sin
gle mothers with children. It used to
be fairly simple when a girl got preg
nant — they got married. Now, they
get welfare.
Imagine if the government an
nounced that nine months from now,
all welfare would be cut off. The
resul t would be con versations be tween
parents and children, boyfriends and
girlfriends all over the country. Hav
ing a baby would be again seen as a
serious, life-changing affair, and sex
again seen as something that has heavy
consequences, not merely a pleasur
able roll in the hay.
Murray also would eliminate re
strictions— favored by black leaders
to prevent “cultural suicide” — that
keep white couples from adopting
black babies. In addition, other laws
would terminate birth parents’ rights
once the child was adopted, eliminat
ing replays of the Jessica DeBoer
case.
If the present trends continue, if
nothing is done, then illegitimacy will
find its way into the white community
as it did the black areas, and with it
will come the attendant social pathol
ogies, namely crime of all varieties.
When gang-banging takes over the
suburbs, calls for law and order will
ring out.
Given the human penchant for for
fcitingcivil liberties in favor ofordcr,
the United States in the year 2020
could well be an authoritarian police
state. An army of fatherless children
will have done what the Red Army
could not — bring America to its
knees.
Kepfldd li > graduate student In history
and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
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