While my friend Pisha (NSFW) was staying with me last weekend she remarked that the trunk of my car looked like the trunk of a 16 year olds car, moted. Skateboard, sleeping bag, camping chair, couple pairs of beater Vans sneakers, and about a million loose cassettes strewn haphazardly about. Pish scolded me for treating my tape collection so carelessly. And she was right, I'd been neglecting my mid-90s Bay Area Hip Hop tape-treasure for too long, banished to the trunk a couple years ago during an apartment move and quickly forgotten, the tapes have weathered extreme SF heat (hahaha) and damp SF summers. I'm an idiot. So today after work, with Pisha and slump-beats in mind, I rescued the tapes from "out the trunk" --Too Short. I'm crossing my fingers for a negative on heat or water damage. It took me years to build up this collection, rap tape culture in the Bay Area in the mid-90s was huge, 4 tracks were king, dubs were everywhere, rare and limited editions popping up from various crews almost daily. I fiended for tapes, bought a couple a week for a couple years (my first purchase being MURS's now-ultra rare cassette EP Back For No Good Reason). We would post up in front of Ms. Fields or Blondies on Telegraph almost every weekend, slanging tapes, buying tapes, listening and trading, portable boombox on hand. Sadly, these tapes only represent maybe 1/3 of what I used to own, lost long ago to hothothot Concord summers and evil tape eating ghetto blasters. What was that Bizarro lyric? "My collection of tapes/ and now they're all gone.../ I collect tapes and now they're all gone/ What happened to my collection of tapes?"