The audio cassette is making a comeback, and while it is not going to replace the MP3, that's what gives it its underground appeal for listeners of a certain age, writes DORIAN LYNSKEY
SO WHAT’S MAKING us pause and rewind? During its heyday, the audio cassette was easy to take for granted. It was cheap, portable and simple to duplicate, but, unlike a vinyl album, never a thing of beauty. It always seemed so disposable, and was prone to unspooling in a spew of magnetic spaghetti, thus requiring laborious restoration with the aid of a pencil.
But just as it is facing extinction, the clunky old cassette has been reborn. Last year, indie bands Deerhunter and Dirty Projectors both took the unusual step of putting out albums on cassette, and Universal made the celebrity poetry album, Words for You, Britain's first major-label cassette release in six years. The BBC 6 Music DJ Lauren Laverne celebrates old compilations on her Memory Tapes feature, while in the US there are hundreds of underground labels that specialise in the format, packaging it with a new degree of artistry. In the era of iPods, the cassette has become the repository of a generation's affection for the analogue age. You can buy iPod cases, T-shirts, computer hardware and even jewellery that pays tribute to its shape.
British record labels began releasing cassettes in October 1967, shortly after electronics giant Philips perfected the design. They took off as a mass-market medium after the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979. Between 1985, when it overtook vinyl, and 1992, when it was eclipsed by CDs, it was the most popular audio format in the country. But sales collapsed at the end of the 1990s and major labels abandoned the cassette in 2003.
Universal's decision to press 4,000 cassettes of Words for Youwas prompted by requests from older listeners who didn't use CDs, let alone MP3s. But specialist cassette labels, which have boomed over the last two years, are born out of choice rather than necessity, running off limited-edition tapes on stacks of second-hand decks. The low cost is just one factor. Once derided, cassettes are now cherished for their imperfections. The way the sound subtly mutates over time does no favours to Lady Gaga, but it breathes extra vibrancy into lo-fi, experimental music.
“I grew up listening to tapes,” says Canadian Al Bjornaa, who set up his Scotch Tapes label in 2008. “It was kind of cool how each tape sounded different depending on what cassette deck you used.”
Bjornaa even re-uses old cassettes as well as fresh blanks. “You can sometimes still hear the original music playing behind the new tracks. It adds a certain something that makes each cassette unique.”
Bjornaa admits that nostalgia also plays a part. People old enough to remember the importance of cassette labels in the post-punk years are aligning themselves with a long DIY tradition. They are also the home-taping generation. An iTunes playlist, burned on to multiple CDs, can never be a labour of love in the same way as a mix tape brought to life through hours hunched over a pause button.
Children of the 1980s, too, are revisiting the format on which they first discovered music. "What you grew up with just sounds right," says 22-year-old Brad Barry, a student at the University of Texas who hosts a weekly cassette-only radio show called C60 Radio.
Clearly, nostalgia alone won’t reverse the cassette’s commercial nosedive, but that’s rather the point. While an MP3 can travel around the globe within hours, tapes inhabit the world of the true underground – although, ironically, most are sold online. “It keeps it from becoming mainstream,” says Barry.
Faced with the bloodless convenience of digital music, it is only human to hanker after the cumbersome and the fallible. The record companies, too, might have reason to look fondly back, now that the alarmist slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music” is just a retro T-shirt design and digital piracy is wreaking financial devastation. If only they’d known.
– Guardian service
