The very smart Greg Povey tweeted a random little thought / call to action today ‘Make a mixtape from when you were seventeen’. Ok, I will.
Make a mixtape from when you were seventeen.
— Gregory Povey (@topfife) July 24, 2014
Greg also wrote a few words about it including this
Seventeen is a tricksy time of life to pinpoint: an age of leaving immaturity, delusions of adulthood, tastes developing but still relatively primitive. Mismemory will con you into thinking your seventeen year old self had the tastes of your fourteen or twenty year olds.
March 31st 1993 was when I turned 17. I was coming to the end of my GCSE resit year at Tapton School in Sheffield following a bit of a screw up due to a serious lack of revision the previous year. A tricksy time of life indeed.
I was mainly into drum and bass/trance and hip hop. There are a few stand out DnB tracks from that time but mainly it was about the DJ and the mix and the MC. When looking back it turned out that 1993 was a massive year for hip hop and there are singles and albums I still listen too today from this period. By the end of my 17th year my interest in hip hop was on the wane. Excesses had crept into the albums and videos, it as all 2Pac, Biggie and Puffy and I hated all three of them. Legal drinking age beckoned as did trance and drunm and bass nights at the Palais.
By March 1994 hip hop had been largely left behind but for the majority of my 17th year it was pretty much all I listened too. Here is my age 17 mixtape. Eleven hop hop classics and One final track that mapped out my music taste for the next few years until things got a lot more guitar based.
Leave a Reply