https://soundcloud.com/prozak-morris/evolution-of-the-hip-hop-beat doesn’t exist anymore.
I have a very rare piece of music. It doesn’t exist in any form you can access online. It’s a mixtape of Hip Hop beats spanning from 1975 to 2011. I found it shortly after it was published on SoundCloud. It’s always been special to me, but I never thought about the possibility of it disappearing. I only downloaded the audio because I enjoyed it and wanted to have it in my music collection.
In a way, I’m happy because I still have this relic. In another way, I’m really sad. There was a long and detailed description of what each piece of music in this track is from, and what it represents about the history of Hip Hop. It’s lost forever. Prozak Morris still has a SoundCloud, a Bandcamp, a YouTube.. or at least there are still publicly facing pages there.. but this one track and its associated detail is gone.
Normally, when I run into something like this, I am able to quickly find what I was missing on the Internet Archive. I did find when it was originally published, including access to comments people made on the track shortly after it was released.. but the page where it was posted (and that lengthy description was written) was never archived.
I was.. a bit desperate to find if it still exists, so I looked for other archives. To be fair, I didn’t check under every stone, but I really don’t think it does exist anymore. And I stumbled across another level of pain in the search: Google killed its archives. Used to be, you could browse archived versions or cached versions of websites that Google had indexed, and at one point in time, this page was definitely there.. but it has either long since been deleted.. or was deleted NINE DAYS AGO.
It’s possible this wouldn’t have been lost forever if I searched for it NINE DAYS AGO. Because I absolutely save everything I care about now. And when I remember something I knew about, I go looking for it.
Anything not saved will be lost.
Nintendo Wii Remote Settings “Quit Game” Message
I was going to stop typing there, with a reference to Nintendo which is always more appropriate than one might expect.. but I remembered the phrase wrong, as “Everything that is not saved will be lost.” Apparently, the entire internet remembers the phrase wrong too, as it is quoted everywhere as “Everything not saved will be lost.”
It is also referenced as an in-game quit message when it was part of the Wii Remote Settings. Additionally, a band released an album with a similar name, so now search results for the phrase only refer to that band and album. (Fortunately search suggestions still reference that it has something to do with Nintendo.. or I’d still be a bit lost on its origin.)
Kind of ironic that the origin of such a well-known phrase is almost lost itself.
And.. I only found a single image of the original message. Everything else is incorrect references.
