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Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable
Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled , Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
232 pages, Hardcover
Published March 5, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 24, 2024
Certainly an academic book, but nevertheless accessible, and certainly covers a lot of ground. Focused on both the affordances of cassette technology and the ideologies that made (and still make) the cassette a go-to format for indie, punk, and adjacent music scenes in particular.
November 10, 2023
Reviewed for Library Journal; full review appears there.
June 12, 2024
More academic & dry than I expected.
August 25, 2024
A fun history of the idea of the tape, especially the mix tape, especially as a lagging indicator of the state of indie culture--as Drew notes, the cultural heyday of the mix tape as phenomenon in lyrics and film and memoirs came as indie was wrestling with its own mainstreaming, and so after the tape's real heyday. (Reminds me of the Clay McLeod Chapman book I just read, where the strongest section concerned the affective universe of the local-VHS-store horror section.) I remember making my own, though apparently I missed the memo about curating them as extensively and intensively as, say, Rob Sheffield or Nick Hornby made it sound like you were supposed to if you really cared; I just put a bunch of songs I liked on an SAX90, which I went down to Canal Street to buy, as they were a lot cheaper there, and then listen to them over and over. And all along I should have been considering the emotional ramifications, shared images, and segue implications of song A into B into C, rather than just figuring, hey, here's a song I like. Ah well. He absolutely nails that fetishized but very real sense of discovery in the pre-Spotify era when you actually found a way to hear a band you'd just read about, whether that was The Raincoats, whose album was gospel at Evergreen State (honestly, how is there not a history of the music scene there from 1970 on?), or that Soft Boys LP (Underwater Moonlight) I finally unearthed at that second-floor used-record store in Ann Arbor after maybe six months of paging through the crates.
The other, or additional, idea here is the mix tape as flag-planting: he notes how often famous punk/indie bands in particular remembered making and bringing tapes with them in the van as bonding and aesthetic signal; there's the famous story about how Kurt and Kris were redeemed from metalhead-dom by a mix tape Buzz Osborne made them (which does make me wonder about the transformative power ascribed to these tapes), and we hear similar stories from from other people in other bands from the same time. (He also goes into how the early hip-hop mixtape, in particular, served a slightly different function of social documentation and a similar one of sonic door-opening.) Maybe the most interesting angle is his fairly brief discussion of riot grrl's alternative canon formation, since the official indie-boy cool music list was still dudes with guitars, just different dudes and different sounds.
Issues? The whole discussion of the 90s mainstreaming of indie, and how that challenged indie scenesters' notions of who and what they were, is more described and assumed than actually explored. Given that one of his central points is that the celebration of past mix tapes essentially helped elide the present reality of commercialism, it would have helped to talk about where those points of tension were and how the cultural cachet suddenly accorded the phenomenon resolved them. Also, what about the mainstream itself? I get the idea that lonely punks trapped in, say, the Midwest could learn that there were people like them from a tape, but what about people who made mix tapes full of Journey and Starship and Richard Marx because they felt that those songs articulated something crucial about their emotions? Uncool people have feelings, too.
But the central notion, the tension between tape-as-theft (as he notes, there's a long tradition of moral panics in the record industry around the individual's capacity to record and share sound independently) and tape-as-creative-medium remained in force for years; now, when you have microlabels releasing cassettes that some large portion of the paying audience will never actually listen to, according to surveys, we seem to be at a different juncture, where for some the tape is pure signification, which brings us full circle.
The other, or additional, idea here is the mix tape as flag-planting: he notes how often famous punk/indie bands in particular remembered making and bringing tapes with them in the van as bonding and aesthetic signal; there's the famous story about how Kurt and Kris were redeemed from metalhead-dom by a mix tape Buzz Osborne made them (which does make me wonder about the transformative power ascribed to these tapes), and we hear similar stories from from other people in other bands from the same time. (He also goes into how the early hip-hop mixtape, in particular, served a slightly different function of social documentation and a similar one of sonic door-opening.) Maybe the most interesting angle is his fairly brief discussion of riot grrl's alternative canon formation, since the official indie-boy cool music list was still dudes with guitars, just different dudes and different sounds.
Issues? The whole discussion of the 90s mainstreaming of indie, and how that challenged indie scenesters' notions of who and what they were, is more described and assumed than actually explored. Given that one of his central points is that the celebration of past mix tapes essentially helped elide the present reality of commercialism, it would have helped to talk about where those points of tension were and how the cultural cachet suddenly accorded the phenomenon resolved them. Also, what about the mainstream itself? I get the idea that lonely punks trapped in, say, the Midwest could learn that there were people like them from a tape, but what about people who made mix tapes full of Journey and Starship and Richard Marx because they felt that those songs articulated something crucial about their emotions? Uncool people have feelings, too.
But the central notion, the tension between tape-as-theft (as he notes, there's a long tradition of moral panics in the record industry around the individual's capacity to record and share sound independently) and tape-as-creative-medium remained in force for years; now, when you have microlabels releasing cassettes that some large portion of the paying audience will never actually listen to, according to surveys, we seem to be at a different juncture, where for some the tape is pure signification, which brings us full circle.
May 13, 2024
A superior trade academic book (pleasingly reminiscent of UK cultural historian, Joe Moran) about the history of the cassette tape and the "dyadic" ritualism of mixtape culture.
Cassette tape technology is positioned as a form of disruptive innovation, which (for my money) is best defined as a change that offers competitive advantage on cost over quality. Capitalism being what it is (a "plethora of parasites", according to Martin Newell*), the former almost always wins out - if scalable. The author refers to a "craft-like trade off between time and quality".
The cassette tape was a form of print-on-demand for the audio world ("re-order on demand"), where vinyl manufacture often required sizable "minimal pressings". This positioned it as the "ultimate tool" for DIY / start-up groups that can be put alongside fanzines, and (later) online message boards and blogs in providing an infrastructure for the flourishment of segregated fandoms.
One person's flaw with cassette technology was another person's selling point - whether that's the "sense of contingency" that undermined the version-of-record element of audio recordings (think preprints versus journal articles, LOL); or whether it's resistance to "easy searching" which only adds an "enigmatic materiality" to those of us with romantic bones; whether it's the inherent difficulty of the format for DJs' toilet breaks, or how hard they were to market owing to their physical smallness and thus lack of visibility. All these characteristics perhaps made cassettes unattractive from a revenue perspective, but attractive from a fan culture perspective. And of course subsequently it's the fan culture that has been successfully monetised.
The book goes on to discuss mixtapes, incorporating many interesting snippets though these can't help but feel (arguably appropriately) listlike and personal as well as inescapably dominated by white male culture (of a certain age), which the author clearly endeavours to offset. Part of me wondered if the book might benefit from an accompanying mixtape. This would be self-indulgent but not unwelcome, though my own foray into searching for a song referenced in connection with Kurt Cobain resulted in a quiet cry of "godawful".
* A British guitarist whose project "Cleaners from Venus" features on the book's eye-catching, if hard-to-read, front cover.
Cassette tape technology is positioned as a form of disruptive innovation, which (for my money) is best defined as a change that offers competitive advantage on cost over quality. Capitalism being what it is (a "plethora of parasites", according to Martin Newell*), the former almost always wins out - if scalable. The author refers to a "craft-like trade off between time and quality".
The cassette tape was a form of print-on-demand for the audio world ("re-order on demand"), where vinyl manufacture often required sizable "minimal pressings". This positioned it as the "ultimate tool" for DIY / start-up groups that can be put alongside fanzines, and (later) online message boards and blogs in providing an infrastructure for the flourishment of segregated fandoms.
One person's flaw with cassette technology was another person's selling point - whether that's the "sense of contingency" that undermined the version-of-record element of audio recordings (think preprints versus journal articles, LOL); or whether it's resistance to "easy searching" which only adds an "enigmatic materiality" to those of us with romantic bones; whether it's the inherent difficulty of the format for DJs' toilet breaks, or how hard they were to market owing to their physical smallness and thus lack of visibility. All these characteristics perhaps made cassettes unattractive from a revenue perspective, but attractive from a fan culture perspective. And of course subsequently it's the fan culture that has been successfully monetised.
The book goes on to discuss mixtapes, incorporating many interesting snippets though these can't help but feel (arguably appropriately) listlike and personal as well as inescapably dominated by white male culture (of a certain age), which the author clearly endeavours to offset. Part of me wondered if the book might benefit from an accompanying mixtape. This would be self-indulgent but not unwelcome, though my own foray into searching for a song referenced in connection with Kurt Cobain resulted in a quiet cry of "godawful".
* A British guitarist whose project "Cleaners from Venus" features on the book's eye-catching, if hard-to-read, front cover.
June 19, 2024
Ugh, how did you make this topic boring?
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews