Back in the day, tapes were my preferred (only) method of owning music. I’d make pause tapes off the radio, buy lil cheap tapes from the BX when I thought the clerk wouldn’t notice the “explicit lyrics” sticker, and dub them off friends. My mom had CDs, and my uncle had CDs, and I would dub those, too.

This was long before I even knew earbuds were a thing, so I rolled with hand-me-down cassette players and giant (relative to the size of my head) earphones. I got hype when I finally got a tape player with auto-reverse. A side effect of having giant earphones is that it’s easy to tell when someone is listening to music, and if you were, say, my grandfather, that gave you an opportunity to inquire about your grandson’s wellbeing and taste in music. After, you could confiscate the tapes out of concern for the fact your grandson is putting poison directly into his ears.

He took a lot of my tapes, and it’d take the intervention of my mom to get them back, nine times out of ten. One time out of ten I would steal them back, but that would either require waiting long enough for him to forget he had it or getting caught because he definitely didn’t forget. I swear I heard my Wu-Chronicles tape one and a half times before he took that and I didn’t get it back until I moved to Spain a year later.

At one point, later that same year, I picked up Chant Down Babylon on cassette, a Bob Marley compilation featuring remixes of his songs by R&B, rap, and rock musicians. I liked it because it was more or less a murderer’s row of people I was into—Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Krazyie Bone, Guru, Rakim, Flipmode Squad, Lost Boyz, MC Lyte, Chuck D, and The Roots—sharpening up songs I wasn’t familiar with or wasn’t entirely into.

I’m big on black history and loving the skin you’re in, but I’m not really a Bob Marley dude. I don’t hate reggae, I’ll bang it on occasion, but I don’t love it or have the depth of knowledge needed to love it. It’s aight, basically. If Legend comes on shuffle, I’ll let it ride. My mom owned that one and a couple others, and we used to sing along to stuff like “Buffalo Soldier” in the car, so I’ll forever love singing Marley songs, but I don’t do a lot of independent listening. I liked this album a lot, though, because it had All My Favorites.

Also, my cunning teenage brain saw it as an opportunity. It’s pretty clean, as far as lyrics go. The raps were hot and Bob Marley was cool or whatever, so maybe this was the album where I could finally convince my grandfather rap was the new hotness. So I pass him the tape with a “Hey, you might like this!” thinking I’m slick. He takes it and some time passes. He eventually gives it back to me, and I’m thinking I not only won, but that I’ll get my Wu-Chronicles back on my schedule, not his. I ask him what he thought.

He thinks for a minute, laughs, and says, “Well, grandson, I think they did ol’ Bob dirty with that one.”

Months later, I stole the tape and left the country.