It’s all very well, but does this sort of loyalty have its basis in anything other than nostalgia? Not if a furious essay that appeared two weeks ago on the American music site Popmatters is anything to go by. Despite left-field releases by the likes of Dirty Projectors and Crystal Castles that sold out their cassette runs, Calum Marsh, author of Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture, insists that “at best, the cassette revival is merely a vacuous fad of no genuine value . . . at worst, a confused, cultural misstep more dangerous than most would care to admit”.
Might it not be that tapes offer something that subsequent technologies have failed to provide? Moore maintains that the CD is a vulnerable format that is designed to be re-bought. Anyone who has tried to keep CDs in a car — you might as well attack them with a cheese knife — must surely concur. On CDs the information is exposed. On cassettes it is protected by a plastic shell. The price of cassettes at my local charity shop — a can’t-give-them-away 20p a throw — suggests that, in the neophilia of the 21st century, these are considerations we may have simply forgotten about.
Since I started relieving Oxfam of their surplus, I have filled my car with albums by the Supremes, Van Morrison, James Brown and Talk Talk. Surprisingly, the cassette era even extends to relatively recent gems such as Radiohead’s Kid A. Better still, the foetal bass and padded cell production of that album’s highlights — Everything in its Right Place, Morning Bell — is perfectly suited to the warm, cocooned ambience of magnetic tape.
Of course, central to the lingering affection that people have for tapes is the fact that you could compile them yourself. “Home taping is killing music,” warned the skull and crossbones on the back of several major label releases in the early 1980s. I still have the first cassette of songs I ever recorded from the radio. Thirty years after I removed it from its case, my red ferric BASF C90 features excerpts from that Sunday night staple Star Choice, in which a celebrity of the day got to be DJ for a couple of hours. Separated only by inter-song banter from the Birmingham City star striker Trevor Francis are such hits as Chicago’s If You Leave Me and ELO’s Living Thing.
Victoria Hesketh, of Little Boots fame, is 16 years younger than me, but even she remembers sourcing her music by a similar means. “Oh, absolutely. You would sit by the tape recorder with your finger poised on the pause button because you’d want to catch it before the DJ started talking.” Take away the technologies of the era and such behaviour was no different from that of ten-year-olds illegally downloading the latest N-Dubz and Chipmunk hits to their computers. So why did it somehow not feel as wrong?
Moore thinks that the moral differential lies in the aesthetic merits of the two formats: “File sharing is utterly unsexy,” he says. “It takes no time at all to knock up a playlist from your iTunes folder and give it to someone.”
He surely has a point, and one that’s reflected in the monetary decline in the value of music. Everything to do with consuming music has become easier. In the past when you compiled a tape for someone, the time spent making it was central to its perceived value. You would also have a fairly good idea that each track followed on smoothly from the last one because the compilation would have been made in real time.
Moore compares DIY compilations to scrimshaws — pieces of whalebone on which voyaging sailors would make ornate carvings. “Sometimes I go to yard sales to buy cassettes compiled by people who are complete strangers to me. You see something that has ‘Marty’s Mix’ scrawled on it in ballpoint pen. You take it home and you don’t know if it’s going to be US post-punk hardcore or Kenny Rogers. Whatever it is, though, I know I’m getting a slice of someone’s life. Cassettes are the only format that can give you that.”
From The Times Dec 18th 2009
