Have a Healthy Dairy Snack, Man

The year is 1998. Titanic is dominating the big screen with a double VHS box set, Furby’s are introducing millions of children to night terrors, and I am 7 years old sitting on the living room floor with my brothers listening to a cassette tape. Not just any cassette tape though, this tape is full of songs dedicated solely to the benefits of dairy. As the speakers of our Fisher Price Sing Along Tape Recorder pumped out its smooth, lactose tunes, the synapses of our brains collectively rerouted until we remembered every lyric almost reflexively.

It’s hard to understand why certain things in life happen the way they do. For whatever the reason, that tape stuck around. Physically, it sat packaged away in an overstuffed closet with the rest of our childhood toys, unearthed periodically while cleaning or searching for something else. Spiritually, it survived through the occasional joke or lyric fragment sung out loud knowing that another brother would finish the verse. Eventually childhood turned to adolescence, and adolescence to adulthood, and the tape was largely forgotten. Until, of course, it wasn’t.

Like most good childhood memories, the nostalgia of that tape hit strongly enough one day that I resolved myself to listen to it again. A quick group text revealed that our copy - which had been shepherded through countless moves from high school, to college, to apartments, and houses by one brother - had finally been lost in the shuffle of time. No matter though, as a millennial armed with a lifetime spent growing alongside Internet search engines, I assumed a copy would not be hard to find. I was wrong.

For a long time, my efforts yielded nothing. Countless hours spent checking the second page of Google and trying Bing that one time scouring the tubes of the Internet had almost resigned me to the fact that I would never again hear the songs we had spent so much time enjoying. Then in my darkest hour, a glimpse of hope. My dogged pursuit of the mystery cassette had led me to one singular, outdated Reddit post which contained one of the lyrics I was able to remember:

Two years earlier, someone had posted those lyrics to r/tipofmytongue in a last ditch effort to find the name of the cassette. They explained, to my amazement, that their fiancée remembered the cassette from her childhood, and that it had become a family joke for her as well. A series of comments below revealed the tape had been created by the National Dairy Council. It had been given away as a promotional offering by Big Y, a grocery chain local to the area, where my parents occasionally shopped. Further, the only known copy of Sing-A-Long Milk Melodies was housed in the National Agriculture Library and, apart from a copy of the tape jacket and a song list, no other information could be found online.

For me, that was all I could ask for. I threw a comment on the post, astonished that anyone else had even remembered the album, and sent the info over to my brothers so we could laugh about how we bonded over musical milk propaganda. We then promptly forgot all about the tape, again.

The Internet catches a lot of flak these days, most of it unfairly. In a world made small by the demand for constant connection, it can be easy to default to negativity and blame the tool instead of the craftsman. But this past weekend, I was reminded of the positives. When I woke up Saturday morning, I noticed a Reddit DM from a random user with the message: “I saw your comment on a post about it so I thought I’d let you know that I found a copy of the milk songs cassette tape and put it on YouTube.” My jaw dropped. A random stranger had seen my two year old comment on a now four year old Reddit post, tracked down a copy of what can only be described as the rarest cassette tape of all time, recorded it, uploaded it to YouTube, and then personally messaged me because the original post had been archived. In other words, they had handed me a piece of my childhood back.

Needless to say, I immediately sent out the link to my brothers. We spent the rest of the morning listening to the album on repeat, now spread out across different cities and time zones, but still very much on the living room floor of the house we grew up in.

CKaz

Sing-A-Long Milk Melodies Definitive Song Rankings:

1. Smoothy Groovy Smoothie

2. Milky Clouds

3. Dunk & Dip It in Milk

4. Have A Healthy Dairy Snack, Man

5. Let’s Go Down To The Grocery Store

6. The Old Oak Tree

7. The Chocolate Milk Train

8. Big World Milk Jig