“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”
The BBC Magazine have just popped this gem of an article up. They gave 13-year old Scott Campbell (seen above) a walkman to use instead of his mp3 player. Surprisingly, apart from the strange social reactions he got, the walkman seemed to do rather well – especially the two-headphone feature. Mine didn’t have this, but I wish it had (giving your friend the other headphone meant losing out on panned tracks in stereo). A friend of mine told me that the day the third Propagandhi album came out, him and some friends split the signal using a headphone mixer, but that this gave each set a fraction of the usual volume, making it almost impossible to hear above the rumble of the school bus.
Just writing this little bit about the BBC article has got me thinking about how cassettes have played a massively important role in my world. I’ve got boxes and boxes of them at home, mainly full of 4-track recordings that you can’t play on a normal system (because for quality it records at just over twice the normal speed of a cassette player, and in one direction in 4 separate streams where a normal system would split the tape into two (sides A and B)). I’ve got boxes still of albums I had on vinyl or CD that were laboriously recorded onto tape and labelled so that I could listen to them on the move, or in the car, or at work. Or even more laboriously recorded from the radio after hours spent hanging on the pause button waiting for one particular song. Or putting the tape recorder with a built-in microphone in front of the TV to record the score from Jurassic Park as the credits rolled on the screen. Ditto for the Quantum Leap theme. and Back To The Future.
It’s blatantly obvious that cassette tapes aren’t better quality than mp3s or Cds. But at the time they were the best thing going…they were versatile, they allowed anyone who wanted to to grab sound and keep it for themselves. Anyone remember this:
Cassettes got the music industry scared, because consumers could do things for themselves. I’m not going to start rehashing things about DIY music, self-publishing, anti-piracy and DRM that have been better said by other people…but safe to say that even if cassettes are obsolete (which I don’t think they are, but I’ll get to that in a minute), they’ll be around as long as vinyl. They might not have as high a financial or nostalgic value as wax, but they won’t be a redundant part of music history from a historical, creative, or even commercial standpoint. Peter Broderick just released a cassette of ten songs on a label called Digitalis, that does limited runs of exclusive music on tape. It came out mid-April, and it’s a collectors item now. Same as the Algernon Cadwallader demo tape. In fact, tons of those bands on the east coast of the USA still release their demos on cassette as well as mp3 download. Free mp3 download as well (just see If You Make It for a massive list of punk demos – there are some gems in there).
One of my favourite bands of all time, and one I’m lucky enough to know personally and to have toured with – Fine Before You Came – have just released their new album for free online, but are having it pressed up onto vinyl, cd, and cassette by a variety of labels.
I’m thinking of what my point is in all this. I think my point is that music is awesome, and if digital has given me anything, it’s given me back the time I spent labeling cassettes and hovering on the pause button, and allowed me to use that time to listen to even more music. But I’m glad that I lived through the eighties and had the experience of the clunkiness and the labeling and the pause button and the not-being-able-to-get-high-speed-dubbing working…as it’s given me an appreciation of the time and effort that goes into making something so that others can appreciate it too…and for me that translates into a pathological attraction to the hand-made, and a respect for the creativity of others, and an excitement for the future of non-DRM/creative commons/independent music from the perspective of creator and rabid consumer.
“Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis.”
…but perhaps that anticipation and excitement has moved towards something else, something a little more intangible – human creativity. I hope so anyway.
