Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves across the U.S. and around the world, while the cassette’s likeness pops up on t-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and phone cases. Without discounting its much-vaunted resurgence, Rob Drew’s Unspooled asks how the cassette became the vessel of such enduring meanings and desires in the first place. How did this lowly, hissy format which began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players come to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music? And what sorts of unfulfilled desires did the cassette point to in a postmillennial music marketplace? Based on archival research of sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Drew zeroes in on a period in the early 1980s when supporters and opponents of the cassette generated stories imputing very different motives to it. While music industry representatives set out to convince the public that the cassette was an abettor of piracy that lacked intrinsic value, a host of music-based subcultures adopted the cassette as a means of formal and informal distribution. Drew focuses on 1980s indie rock culture, which took up the cassette as a symbol embodying its self-definition as an outsider community while also accommodating its quiet aspirations toward wider acceptance. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mix tape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy that measured the effectivity of music by its selfless circulation of intimate feeling. Through such practices and stories, musicians and fans came to understand the sharing of cassettes as an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication, birthing rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting that we now take for granted.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/unspooled