12/20/2023 0 Comments Pencil cassette tape![]() ![]() It was a way to listen to music that was in the listener’s control rather than dictated to them. ![]() “The most important one is the freedom they afforded both listeners and artists to create their own musical experiences, and be able to share and pass around those experiences. “Cassettes have a bunch of different roles,” Masters says on a video call, sitting in front of a shelving unit of, yes, tapes. Cassettes spurred the spread of hip-hop and thrash metal, created a micro-economy for go-go in Washington DC, and they became (and in many cases remain) the preferred medium for lo-fi and experimental music. In the developing world, where major labels operated near-monopolies, they were a means to put music into circulation that held no commercial interest to the big companies, spurring the recognition of genres in the process (the Syrian singer Omar Souleyman began as one of the wedding singers whose sets were sold on cassette at stalls, before he was heard by western tape collectors and won an international audience). Unspooled by Rob Drew and High Bias by Marc Masters The format instilled fear of piracy in the music industry, yet did more than any prior invention to spread music around the world. Mixtapes, though, were just one way the cassette had a seismic impact on the music industry, as explored in two new books – Unspooled by Rob Drew and High Bias by Marc Masters. I’d sneak into the office at Boots in Slough, where I worked in the holidays, photocopy fragments of book covers and postcards to make a collage cover to wrap around the J-card insert, with the title on the spine – each one was numbered entry in a series called Never Say No to Perfect Popcorn – and then send to whichever beneficiary I felt most deserving. Mine were a succession of tapes of mid-80s indie and old psychedelia. And there was always some hip-hop that I thought the girls would like – A Tribe Called Quest.” “I knew a little bit about jazz, so I’d always put some jazz on. “I used to try to impress with a really wide variety of genres,” says Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas. ![]()
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