Revivals of curiosity in vinyl information have turn into a fixture of common tradition over the previous 4 a long time. It may simply be argued that 33⅓-rpm document revivalism has now lasted considerably longer than the vinyl album’s precise reign as the preferred medium for listening to recorded sounds.
Music journalist Marc Masters has introduced a revival of a less-mythologized medium in his new ebook, “High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape.” Masters, whose work has appeared on NPR and within the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, traces the unfamiliar historical past of cassette tapes from their invention within the early Nineteen Sixties to their peak within the Eighties and past.
Cassette tapes’ lingering enchantment
Who didn’t get pleasure from a selfmade mixtape within the ’80s?
istock
And there’s a past. Despite cassette tapes’ standing as a dinosaur expertise, they’ve continued to flourish slightly below the floor of common tradition as a way of recording and listening to music.
“Tape isn’t dead,” Masters mentioned within the aftermath of a short and well-received East Coast tour in help of the ebook. “There are lots of young people interested in tapes for the same reason we were interested in them growing up.”
Just like the colourful low-fidelity — or “lo-fi” — recording communities that emerged on either side of the Atlantic within the Eighties, modern cassette fans respect the straightforward entry the medium supplies to creating, programming and distributing music. A bunch of tape-only, impartial labels resembling Astral Spirits, Crash Symbols, and Geographic North thrive in a world the place the behemoth document enterprise of previous is a shell of its Twentieth-century self.
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Masters, in truth, labored with these and different tape labels to create a cassette that accompanies the ebook. This doesn’t imply that curiosity in tapes is the area solely of an esoteric music subculture. It stays there for everybody.
“It’s such a universal subject in a weird way,” Masters mentioned of the enchantment of cassette tapes. “So many people either grew up using tapes or found tapes in their parents’ closet. Almost everyone I spoke with on the tour said that the book made them think of some stories that had with tapes that they hadn’t thought of in 20 or 30 years.”
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Cassettes helped some genres thrive
“High Bias” traffics in each considerate cultural evaluation and nostalgia, providing readers a glance again right into a shared previous and a sequence of recent home windows by means of which to consider cassette tapes.
“I didn’t want it just to be a trip down memory lane. I wanted that to be part of it, for sure, but I wanted the history part of it to be things that people might not know about even if they were around for tapes,” Masters mentioned. “Maybe people didn’t know how crucial they were to hip-hop or to
heavy metal or how crucial they were to people internationally who couldn’t record otherwise.”
One of the ebook’s most substantive contributions is its thoroughgoing description of the methods through which the cassette tape democratized music consumption, manufacturing and distribution.
“Before cassettes came along, there wasn’t a cheap, easy, affordable way to control the music you listened to,” Masters mentioned. For the lion’s share of listeners, the alternatives of radio-station programmers and document labels decided what they listened to and in what sequence they heard it. Virtually each high-school pupil of the Eighties and Nineties was the creator, recipient or inspiration — if not all three — for a selfmade mixtape on cassette.
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The Grateful Dead affect
“Having a cassette you could record on easily or make mixes on freed up people’s ability to access music they weren’t able to before,” Masters mentioned. “It was democratizing for artists who didn’t have the connections to get on a record label or the money to record at an expensive studio. They could record it on tape, pass it around or even sell it on tape.”
Fans of the Grateful Dead created a vibrant tape-trading tradition constructed across the recording of the band’s reveals within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties. The centrality of tape buying and selling to Grateful Dead fandom grew to become so pronounced that the group ultimately created a sanctioned area at their reveals the place tapers may plug into the band’s soundboard to get the best-quality recordings.
Masters unpacks the various layered world of Grateful Dead tapers in one of many ebook’s greatest chapters.
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Enter the Walkman
The portability of cassettes, significantly after the introduction of the Sony
6758,
SONY,
Walkman moveable cassette participant within the early Eighties, freed listeners to convey their music with them. It additionally expanded the probabilities of music shaping the inside lifetime of listeners, in a lot the identical method that the emergence of the novel within the 18th century offered readers with a brand new, unstated relationship with texts.
“Early Walkman users are quoted in newspapers as saying, ‘This is my own soundtrack. I get to block out the world and listen to what I want to and be who I want to be,’ ” Masters mentioned. Some early listeners even described their experiences as practically elegant — a possibility to inhabit the world whereas experiencing music solely you may hear.
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Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” from 1990, with a conveyable cassette participant.
Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection
For artists, cassettes served as a simple entry level into recording their music, significantly within the Eighties.
For hip-hop artists, the cassette mixtape grew to become the means by which new performers developed followings. Heavy-metal acts of the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties resembling Iron Maiden had hassle getting an viewers with main document labels till selfmade cassette recordings received them a cult following.
Lo-fi turns into excessive artwork
For punk, various and indie acts, the lo-fi sound of cassette recordings grew to become as a lot an aesthetic selection as a matter of economic necessity.
“I don’t think one could have happened without the other, so there’s a kind of interdependence,” Masters mentioned of the interaction between lo-fi artists resembling Guided by Voices, Beat Happening and Daniel Johnston and the gadgets they used to document their music.
“There were certainly people interested before in home recordings,” he defined. “For those people, cassette tapes came along at the right time. But I also think cassettes helped create the lo-fi aesthetic because it started as this thing that’s cheaper and easier to use. Eventually some artists realized, ‘Hey, this is making my music sound a certain way, it has a certain aesthetic itself, and I’m going to lean into that.’ ”
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In the early ’80s, main document labels tried to curb shoppers’ myriad makes use of of cassettes with their heavy-handed “Home Taping Is Killing Music” marketing campaign. There’s little to no proof that taping songs off the radio or making mixtapes harm the document enterprise. Equally scarce is proof that the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” slogan had a lot of an impression on client habits.
“The industry has proven time and again that their first line of defense against piracy is to try to shame their own customers into not doing it,” Masters mentioned. He was talking of each the early ’80s “Home Taping is Killing Music” and the most important labels’ marketing campaign in opposition to file-sharing software program within the 2000s. In each situations, the trade’s multiyear efforts to disgrace followers had been in useless.
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The identical can’t be mentioned for Masters’s multiyear effort on his ebook. He started “High Bias” in 2019 however took a year-and-a-half hiatus so he may safely information his kids’s training within the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. He returned to the ebook with a recent perspective on the topic — one which shines by means of within the concise and considerate method through which its numerous materials is introduced.
Clayton Trutor holds a Ph.D. in historical past from Boston College and teaches at Norwich University. He is freelance author and the creator of “Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta — and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports” and “Boston Ball: Rick Pitino, Jim Calhoun, Gary Williams and the Forgotten Cradle of Basketball Coaches.”
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