A trip to the Goodwill store in Marquete, MI prompted an examination of their media collection. I ignored the piles of CDs, skipped the shelf of LPs, and went to the bin that had cassettes and 8-tracks. For sale at a reasonable price were a handful of 8-track tapes from the 1970s, including a scuffed copy of Billy Joel's "The Stranger". On the video shelves, there were plenty of 1990s vintage VHS tapes and a whole shelf of VHS players stacked up.
This is the same store that had a 1973 Reader's Digest Almanac on the shelf, reporting earnestly on the issues of the day (Nixon, food prices).
The 8-track discovery led me to do some searching, and I found a whole collection of stories in the Fort Worth Weekly about The Dead Media, an 8-track record label with a handful of new releases. See DeadMediaTapes.com for the work of Fort Worth R&B singer-songwriter Nathan Brown.
I have to wonder how long these 8-tracks have been rattling around, and what path they took to get to this particular Goodwill. They had the dusty patina of unloved old media, still recognizably worth something, but not yet at a home that would appreciate them. They aren't hip, or trendy, or ironic; they're just old, at least in this place.
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