A paean to cassettes

While leafing through the book "mix tape: the art of cassette culture", which was recently given to me as a gift from a good friend, I got to thinking about how I came of age at a time when cassette tapes were the dominant mode of conveying music, and a time when VHS cassettes were the dominant medium through which video was disseminated. But the big innovation that came with cassettes - both audio and video - was that you could record on them. They were, to my knowledge, the first widespread medium for recording audio and video.

The other widespread recording medium that was already established was photography. But you typically took pictures of other things or other people, not pictures of existing artistic products (though, I suppose, plenty of people took pictures of paintings, causing some crisis regarding the value we place in an image). Of course, the influence of technologies that allow people to reproduce or copy art on the value of art has been thoroughly explored (probably beat into the ground at this point). I suppose I'm less interested in the ways cassettes allowed people to copy music and video and more interested in the ways in which it facilitated the re-purposing of existing work.

It wasn't radical re-purposing in most cases. It wasn't like we were using Photoshop to create some sophisticated blending of images, or using some audio editing software to create a unique mash-up. We were just putting songs next to other songs on a mix tape, or an episode of Late Night with David Letterman next to an episode of Square One. The juxtaposition still creates something unique, but the way in which it changes the meaning or mood of the listening/viewing experience is more subtle than the total reconfiguration that digital tools facilitate.

The other defining characteristic of that era, to me, only becomes apparent in retrospect: we couldn't disseminate the thing we created very widely. That is the difference between the mix tape and the Playlist on ITunes, Spotify, or YouTube. The mix tape was like a private joke, only intended to be relevant to certain people at a certain time and place, which makes it seem more intimate as I remember it. It makes me wonder about various kinds of hyper-local, hyper-personal social media like Yik Yak and Snapchat that have arisen in the wake of broadcasting social media like Twitter. Will the teens of today look back wistfully on the Snaps or Yaks they sent one another in the same way that I look back on mix tapes I made and received, and those cobbled-together VHS cassettes containing whatever I found funny in 1995?

Of course, the difference is that Snaps and Yaks are also intentionally ephemeral while cassettes were intended to preserve. Also, cassettes were intimate in that they were meant to be shared with one other person, or a small group, but they were comprised of elements from popular culture, which kept them from being too intimate or personal (though when I think back to some of the mix tapes I made for others, they do seem as embarrassingly soul-baring as an ill-conceived Yak). There wasn't even the possibility that the cassette mix would ever leak out into the wider public and impress anyone other than its intended audience of one or a few intimates.

With cassettes, we had a kind of circumscribed freedom to play around with the music and video that informed who we were and who we were becoming. Obviously, home recordings are worth preserving - the home videos and, though there aren't very many, the home audio recordings we made when we were young. But the mix tapes and the VHS tapes of TV shows seem to me to be more indicative of that time, more unique because of their limitations.