High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape – Marc Masters
A single-book focus for this entry, less because of the book’s quality than what it got me thinking about.
The book itself wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be. Masters begins by laying out the history of the cassette tape and tape players. Then he dives into areas of music that were most affected by the popularity of the cassette: underground genres that found traction thanks the the easy production and distribution of tapes; copying and sharing licensed music; recording and collecting live performances; international music; and, of course, the mixtape. He closes by looking at the various cassette revivals of the past couple decades.
That was all fine, but the chapters often seemed repetitive as examples within each section were similar stories from different sources.
While I wasn’t enraptured by the content on my Kindle screen, my brain was working the entire time I was reading it.
I bought my first cassette in the summer of 1983, Def Leppard’s Pyromania. A lot of you know this story: I bought it on my annual visit to my grandparents’ homes in central Kansas, at the Wal-Mart in Great Bend. However, neither set of grandparents owned a tape player so I had to wait three weeks until I got home to listen to my purchase on my mom’s stereo. I had a knock-off Walkman that summer, but it was one of the models that only had a radio, not a tape player. Yet it was the same size as a Sony Walkman. What a weird product! I wonder what the price difference between it and one with a tape player was. I got my first boombox for Christmas later in 1983, but I don’t think I had a proper portable cassette player until 1985 or ’86.
I got my first CD player for Christmas in 1990. In those six-and-a-half years in between, there’s no telling how many cassette tapes I went through. I had a huge library of purchased cassettes, hundreds I would guess. I likely went through as many blank cassettes over that same period, recording music and shows off the radio, dubbing albums from friends, making mixtapes for myself and girls who weren’t as interested in me as I was in them, and even recording strange sounds found on my shortwave radio. If I did an Every Day Carry video in the mid–80s, there’s no doubt a key piece of my kit would have been a stack of blank tapes.
If you are a child of the Eighties, there are songs you can still hear today and remember where you cut off the beginning because you pressed the Pause button a moment too late when trying to record it from the radio, or recall the snippet of the song, DJ chatter, or commercial that came after when you were tardy ending the recording.
I remember wishing you could somehow peel back the layers of music on a tape to find the previous content you had recorded onto them. With music captured off the radio, this would be a time capsule for what I was listening to the fall of my freshman year, or whenever. With mixtapes you later recorded over, it would be fun to recall why you chose certain songs in certain spots.
I also wonder how many of those mixtapes I scattered into the world those girls hung onto. Even if they weren’t interested in me, did they like the music I sent them and let it become part of their lives for months or years down the line? “I should have dated D back in 1990. He had really good taste in music.” Or did they pitch them, or immediately record their own mixes over mine?
I’ve never got the cassette nostalgia trip because, to me, our fond memories are more about what we put on those tapes than the tapes themselves. Cassettes were cool in the Eighties. You could carry your newest one around in your pocket. But there was nothing special about the medium itself. Cassettes were prone to get stressed from too much rewinding and fast-forwarding, the young music fan quickly learning how to use a pencil to return it to its proper tension. Occasionally your player would eat the tape, and you hoped you caught it soon enough to carefully wind it back onto the spools, praying it wasn’t damaged in the middle of your favorite song. There was the ever-present hiss, that depending on the quality of the tape and your player could make it seem like you were listening to AM radio rather than FM. And plenty of other technological faults. Digital music, first on CDs and later on MP3’s, may have been sterile, but also had a much higher threshold for failure.
No, we don’t long for the cassette itself. There are no arguments that cassette music sounds better like there are with vinyl.[1] What we long for are all the memories on those old tapes.
Our relationship with music was definitely different in the era of the cassette. Some of that came with just being a kid. Unless you had a massive allowance, there was a limit to how many tapes you owned, or at least how many current ones. Until I got a job and went crazy buying tapes in 1987, I generally had a rotation of 2–4 current tapes that I would cycle through. When I bought the Miami Vice soundtrack, as one example, I listened to side one, flipped it to side two, then flipped it back and started again. For weeks at a time. Even when I’m really looking forward to a new album in the digital age, I find I listen to it far less frequently, even in the first few days it is out. And, of course, in the digital age with the limitless catalog of music to select from, we hit that moment of paralysis of trying to figure out what to listen to next. In the Eighties, if I got sick of the Miami Vice soundtrack, I only had so many other options.
Digital music doesn’t come with lyric sheets, either. With a tape, and later with CDs, part of the early listening process was pulling out the J-card and reading through the lyrics as you played the tape. It was always fun digging through the liner notes for hidden meanings and information about the band.
I never really thought about this until reading High Bias, but I think one way digital music can’t match cassettes is because tapes required a tangible device to be played on. You had to physically put the cassette into the player and press play. Until Auto Reverse came along you had to go change it to the other side 20–40 minutes later. When you wanted to change albums, it again took a physical effort. And you could sit and stare at your stereo, watching the spools turn, the tape pass the over magnetic head, and on some stereos the needle on the noise level gauge bouncing around.
Today, how many people still own a stereo? Modern “stereos” are most likely laptops and iPhones that send the sound to smart speakers or headphones/ear buds. I most often play music on my crappy little MacBook Air speakers. You find a file on your device, click a digital play button that gives no tactile feedback, and then the music app fades into the background. Maybe you listen while making dinner or doing housework. More likely when Spotify or Apple Music gets minimized, your attention moves to your email client, Twitter, or whatever work applications you are focused on. There is no direct physical connection to your music. You can’t feel the motors turning in the tape player, hear the whine of an aging player or tape that had been left in a hot car too long, no warmth from the tape deck.
None of these observations are offered with any judgement. There’s no real way to quantify what music medium is best. You can’t divorce their relative positives and negatives from the broader contexts that came with the ages of their primes.
Cassettes were more limited and may have forged a stronger connection with the music on them because of those restrictions. Counter that with the ability to play literally millions of songs at a moments notice on a device that isn’t much bigger than a cassette tape.
I haven’t owned a tape player since we sold the lake house six years ago. Even that one was messed up and I tossed my two large boxes of cassettes since it couldn’t play them properly. I can find just about every one of those albums on Spotify, and can play them at a moment’s notice.
It is the mixtapes I held onto for nearly 30 years that I miss. I still remember one I got from a friend sometime in 1988, filled with a DJ selection of all kinds of remixed hip-hop tracks strung together in a perfect, 30-minute show. It had been copied multiple times, and you had to crank the volume way up and battle serious tape noise to enjoy the tracks. I can’t even remember what most of those songs were. Even if I could, those remixes are probably lost forever, never having made it to the digital age.
I’m not one of those music fans that would dive into the cassette revival. But that era gave me too many wonderful musical memories to judge anyone who chooses to.
An argument which is based purely on subjective qualities. ↩