Dead media is alive and well in my house.

My husband, Brian, and I have an affinity for various types of discontinued and outdated media from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s everything from 8-tracks and LaserDiscs to VHS tapes and retro video game consoles.

There’s something fun about revisiting old media from your childhood or experimenting with now-obsolete technology that was popular before you were born.

I want to highlight some of my old media as a way to celebrate Dead Media Day, which is October 12 at Ann Arbor District Library’s downtown location.

The inaugural event pays homage to retro media, entertainment, and ephemera, and features vendors selling vintage and rare items.

It will also have exhibits, hands-on demonstrations, and crafts for fans who want to step back in time and honor all things old and once forgotten.

Here’s a look at five types of dead media that continue to thrive in the Stratton household.

A record was broken at Michigan Stadium on September 7, 2013, when 115,109 people watched the Wolverines defeat Notre Dame. It's still the most attended college football game of all time.

​The Big House is ready for another record-breaking performance.

​Country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan and pop-rock singer-songwriter John Mayer are headlining the University of Michigan’s first concert at the stadium on September 27. The show is expected to have over 112,000 fans in attendance. 

​“That total means Bryan is poised to break the all-time U.S. record for a ticketed concert by a single act, which was set by George Strait at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field in 2024,” wrote Brandon Champion in a February 15, 2025, article for The Ann Arbor News.

​However, this isn’t the first time U-M has tried to have a concert at Michigan Stadium.

Freddie Brooks wants to create a time capsule for the band Detroit Energy Asylum.

The Metro Detroit producer and label owner discovered that analog tape recordings of the group’s past studio sessions were starting to disintegrate and raced to preserve them.

“I had roughly three dozen of these big two-inch reels [of analog tape] and some of them were starting to shed,” said Brooks, who produced and managed the band from 1980 to 2000.

“The [tape] was falling off, and I ended up having to bake all those tapes and to transfer them for posterity. That’s when I started going through them, and that’s what happened with the ReCreation record [in 2019]. I was going through them and thought, ‘These songs are mostly finished. Most of them haven’t been released.’ I put the ReCreation [record] together, and beyond that, later on, I started listening to some of the other ones.”

Brooks realized there was a wealth of Detroit Energy Asylum material to unearth and share with fans—both past and present.

In 1994, seven friends never anticipated they’d make hip-hop history in Ann Arbor and beyond. A mutual love of creating music and playing sports prompted the Huron High School students to form a group that would eventually become Athletic Mic League.

“We weren’t Athletic Mic League then. We were the Anonymous Clique, but we all started going to Trés [Styles’] crib writing and messing around on little beat machines and little recording setups in 1994,” said Jamall “Buff1” Bufford, one of Athletic Mic League’s MCs.

“We didn’t become Athletic Mic League until probably [1997]. Wes [Taylor] came up with the name … so we said, ‘Yeah, let’s go with it.’ We all play sports. We took an approach to writing and practicing like it was training.”

Thirty years later, that disciplined mindset has stayed with the members of Athletic Mic League: Trés Styles, Wes “Vital” Taylor, Vaughan “Vaughan Tego” Taylor, Michael “Grand Cee” Fletcher, Mayer Hawthorne, Kendall “14KT” Tucker, and Bufford.

Now, the group is celebrating its contributions and legacy in a new track aptly titled “Made History.”

Commissioned to write and record the track for the Ann Arbor District Library's Ann Arbor 200 bicentennial project, Athletic Mic League also pays homage to Washtenaw County hip-hop history and Black history in Ann Arbor.

Poet, writer, and activist John Sinclair has died at age 82.

According to the Metro Times, he died of heart failure this morning at Detroit Receiving Hospital and had been struggling with health problems in recent months.

Born in Flint in 1941, Sinclair was a highly regarded leader in Detroit’s counterculture scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Famous for his radical politics, Sinclair also managed the MC5 and co-founded the White Panther Party and the Ann Arbor Sun.

In 1969, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison after offering two joints to an undercover female narcotics officer.

Various public and private protests soon culminated in response to Sinclair’s sentencing, including John Lennon writing a song called “John Sinclair” and the launch of an annual marijuana legalization rally in Ann Arbor that would later become known as Hash Bash.

Toward the end of the 2004 smash “Time’s Up” by Jadakiss, a voice came on the radio as a familiar new beat was blended in:

“World-famous Prop Shop. DJ Chill Will in full effect. That’s how it goes down. Saturday nights, 9 to 12 o’clock Eastern Standard Time right here on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. You can also check us out live on the world wide web at WCBN dot o-r-g and radio dot net backslash WCBN. It’s Saturday night, y’all. We got about an hour and a half left in the show. Sit back and relax, you know we got the classics coming. Prop Shop. Chill Will. Let’s get it.”

I was tuned into 88.3, the University of Michigan radio station, while driving down a darkened stretch of Island Lake Road outside of Dexter. It was a little past 10:30 pm on September 9, and as the DJ concluded his talk-up, I got goosebumps when the bassline thumped.

It was EPMD’s 1988 jam “You’re a Customer,” which has that “Fly Like an Eagle” sample from the Steve Miller Band, but the head-nodding beat is built off a drum sample and bass riff from ZZ Top’s “Cheap Sunglasses”—and it’s deep.

I leaned over and turned up the volume, feeling the vibration rattle my windows. The temp was hovering around 60 degrees, and with nobody else on the road, I opened the sunroof and rolled down the windows so the song could fly from my car and fill the late-summer air.

The Prop Shop has been rattling glass since 1988, and “Chill” Will Higgs has been at the helm for almost the entire time. 

It’s also one of the oldest continually running hip-hop radio shows in the world.

The nearly 55-year-old Higgs mostly plays slappers from the late ‘80s through the mid-2010s, with occasional splashes of dancehall reggae—and virtually nothing from the post-trap world of hip-hop and its cymbal-driven songs with light snares. To quote A Tribe Called Quest’s 1993 song “We Can Get Down,” The Prop Shop is all about artists who “with a kick, snare, kicks and high hat / [are] skilled in the trade of that old boom bap.”

For the commercial mixes Higgs sends out to radio clients such as KRYC and KPAT in California and WJZE in Toledo, Ohio, he does play contemporary rap.

But for The Prop Shop, it’s strictly classic hip-hop for the heads from the eras Higgs loves. Other artists I heard that night include Smif-N-Wessun, Run the Jewels, Jay-Z, The Diplomats, Baby Cham, Dr. Dre, Paul Wall, 50 Cent, and Jeru the Damaja.

The true window shakers. The essence of hip-hop. The real boom-bap.

John Nick Pappas, a retired professor of sculpture and drawing at Eastern Michigan University, died on July 6. He was 88.

Throughout his career, Pappas created sculptures in his Ypsilanti studio for Ann Arbor’s Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital (now Trinity Health Michigan), the University of Michigan’s Medical School campus, Detroit’s Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan headquarters, and other hospitals and public places. He also created a program at EMU to have student art installed on campus.

Pappas’ daughter Catherine Pappas revisited her father’s career in the winter of 2015 for Ypsilanti Gleanings:

“He still runs into former students, even though he’s been retired for many years now. I’ve been with him on more than one occasion when this has happened and I can tell you, it is pretty special. It makes me beam with pride when I see and hear about the incredible role he has played in the lives of many of his students. Back in the late 70’s, three of his graduate students; Ed Olson, Paul Mauren, Jeanne Flanagan and my oldest brother Nick worked with him in his studio to help create the Blue Cross piece, which took four years to complete.”

The rest of Catherine’s story, “My Dad, John Nick Pappas, Sculptor” can be read here.

Pappas also did an interview on September 27, 2022 with Creative Washentaw's Deb Polich for "creative:impact" on WEMU-FM 89.1.

In May 1953, the Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library (FAADL) shared a historical moment alongside Ernest Hemingway.

The library’s volunteer organization officially became a nonprofit the same month Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for The Old Man and the Sea.

Seven decades later, Hemingway’s novella still graces the library’s shelves as FAADL celebrates its 70th anniversary of supporting Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) patrons and programs through used book sales. From library locations to summer bookmobiles to online bookstores, the group has played a pivotal role in AADL’s evolution.

“[FAADL] was really instrumental in the location of where the downtown library sits, and it was instrumental in the branches,” said Rachel Pastiva, FAADL’s director, while reflecting on the group’s platinum anniversary.

That same year, FAADL advocated for a separate and central location for the library since it was attached to an old high school at State and Huron streets. By 1957, the new location ended up being the current downtown site at Fifth Avenue and William Street.

It was New Year’s Eve 2011 and we wanted a low-key way to celebrate.

My husband Brian suggested seeing The Artist, a critically acclaimed black-and-white-silent French film, at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater that evening.

The theater’s Screening Room featured a couple of showings, and we opted for the 9 pm show. That way, we could see the film and still get home to watch the Times Square ball drop at midnight on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

When we arrived at the theater, we saw a musician playing a Hammond organ about 20 minutes before The Artist started.

The organist provided pre-show entertainment and didn’t accompany The Artist during its screening, but his performance sparked our curiosity about the instrument, including the 1927 Barton pipe organ in the Michigan’s Main Auditorium.

For us, the theater organ served as a brief musical portal to the past, recalling a bygone era when it accompanied silent films at movie palaces from the 1900s to the 1920s.

Over the years, we’ve enjoyed seeing organists perform on Barton pipe organs at the Michigan Theater—the only one left in Ann Arbor—and Detroit’s Redford Theatre. Those beautiful theater organs offered warm welcomes as we took our seats to watch different films.

Nearly a decade later, I wanted to learn more about local theater organs, the theaters that housed them, and the organists who play them. 

Michael G. Nastos, a longtime music journalist and radio DJ in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, died over the weekend. He was 70 years old.

Nastos had been struggling with health problems and was using a wheelchair for the past year or so in public appearances—of which there were many.

Because even with the issues he was facing, nothing could keep Nastos away from engaging with the driving love of his life: music.