This week in Showing My Age, I want to pay homage to a lost treasure of my youth: the cassette tape. In the modern world of MP3s and streaming, there are paradoxically both more and fewer ways to interact with music, especially as professionally (and probably simultaneously commercially) curated playlists and the ubiquitous “Shuffle” function come to dominate music consumption. But in my day – cue wagging wrinkled finger and old lady sneer – you had to really want to have that music on demand. And the cassette tape was really the only way to go about it.
For those who are unaware (dear god I am feeling older by the second), cassette tapes were seemingly insubstantial rectangles of plastic containing magical magnetic tape that was able to play back music on fabulous devices variously known as boomboxes, Walkmen, or, less creatively, tape players. In the same way that albums are sold in MP3 format on Amazon or iTunes today, which is itself becoming borderline anachronistic in the age of Spotify and Apple Music, or that CDs were sold a couple decades ago, back in the 80s and early 90s they were packaged for the public on cassette tape. But these were no mere passive devices through which to listen to music – oh no. They were much more than that.
Before cassettes – and, clearly, in the evolution of hipsters this millennium, after them as well – music was primarily consumed through vinyl, and in certain circumstances 8-track tapes. These were all well and good, but the ability to actively interact with them was limited or nonexistent: music was recorded on them, they were packaged for sale, and you listened to them. Geniuses in the South Bronx, and before that Jamaica, manipulated them to create hip hop and its precursors, but your average, non-musical-prodigy fan couldn’t do much beyond passively enjoy the songs as created.
Cassettes were a whole different beast. You could buy blank ones relatively cheaply and record onto them from various sources. I can’t pretend to have been active in the scene when heads were making quasi- and actual professional mixtapes by recording to them from vinyl – although they have their own special place in Tupac’s Thugz Mansion. What I did do, as did so many others of my generation, was record onto them from more mundane sources like other cassettes and the radio. This opened up whole new realms of music curation, if not creation, as we were able to make more basic “mixtapes” featuring collections of songs, in particular combinations and in a particular order (fuck is a Shuffle??), to share with friends and fellow music nerds. My dad and his friends were part of the Baby Boom generation, but even they would pick different themes and challenge each other to see who could come up with the best mix centering on that theme and slug it out via cassette.
As a 9 to about 13 year old (because it was at about that age that I moved on to primarily CDs), my creations were more primitive but no less built on love. I eventually began putting together more intricate collections of songs with an ear for sonic cohesion and topical relevance, but my primary purpose was more basic: to have all the songs I wanted to hear readily available. Before the days of instant 99 cent song downloads, the main way to hear your favorite songs on a day-to-day basis was to listen to the radio for hours on end until they popped up in rotation. You generally didn’t have to wait too long because then, as now, the number of songs on offer was limited and probably also dictated largely by payola, which meant they were confined to major label releases from industry mainstays. Because of this, if you were able to dedicate a good hour or two of your time, you would be able to record just about any song you wanted assuming you were listening to the right station. This meant (almost) instant access to the music you craved once you were able to capture it on tape.
There were different ways to go about this. You could turn on the radio, set a tape to record, and then walk away, returning an hour or two (or 24) later to see what gems you had captured. I had a good friend do this for me, in one of the most genuine acts of friendship I have ever experienced, after I mentioned how much I wanted a particular song – Xscape’s “The Arms of the One Who Loves You.” Within a day of bringing it up, my friend returned with a cassette tape on which he had recorded the desired song as a gift. I’m not sure I was ever so flattered or appreciative.
The other option was to listen attentively with your finger poised just above the Record button, waiting for the telltale signs of your song coming up. Once you heard the intro from the DJ or those precious first few notes, it was on like Donkey Kong (Jesus Christ I can’t help the old person references) and you would press down on that magic little “R” with the red circle and wait for the song to end, at which point you would hit Stop and move on to waiting for the next musical morsel.
Being the anal retentive nerd that I am, this latter path was the one I took most often. I can’t even count how many tapes I accumulated this way, listening to B95 in Fresno or Power 106 in LA (among others), waiting for songs by Snoop or Brandy to grace the airwaves so I could snag them. I was obsessed with “All Cried Out” by Allure and 112 for a season and listened to the entire Top 8 at 8 one evening, convinced it would be on there. When it wasn’t, I was disappointed, not only in my inability to record it but also in my fellow human beings for failing to recognize this masterpiece and put it on the countdown. One day I did manage to record my favorite song of the moment, and it was on possibly my favorite ever radio mixtape, which also featured classics like “They Don’t Know” by Jon B and “Got ‘til It’s Gone” by Janet Jackson. I can still remember setting the table as a 13 year old with my Walkman in my pocket and my headphones on, jamming to that shit.
My most memorable example of this, though, was my quest to record “California Love.” As anyone with half a brain can tell you, the absolute pinnacle of this otherworldly tune is when Tupac enters on the second verse and crushes your skull with the pent-up bravado of the line, “Out on bail, fresh out of jail, California DREAMIN’!” I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I spent hours in my OCD mind replaying and typing out those words on my imaginary keyboard. I also spent a considerable amount of time trying to catch it on cassette, but for one reason or another I was unsuccessful at this for quite a while. One fine day, though, the gods smiled upon me and blasted it over the airwaves while I was waiting, at the ready, and in a position to record it. I was grinning from ear to ear as the tape rolled from one spool to the other, only to be brutally beat down by the end of the fucking tape. Yes, the damn thing ran out of time on Side A right as Tupac’s verse began. I froze for a second in disbelief, then frantically ejected it and flipped it over to catch as much of the rest of the song as I could, but the damage was done. I had lost a little piece of history to the 45 minute run time of a side of a tape.
To this day, I rue my mistake in not properly prepping for the moment. The wound is salved, though, by the fact that I have since acquired said song in multiple different formats and saved it on multiple hard drives, in both computer and car memory, as well as through on-demand music services like the aforementioned Spotify and Apple Music. (And yes, I subscribe to both, because I am ridiculous in my completism.) This doesn’t lessen the devastation I felt at the time, but it is one of the perks of adulthood. And considering how few of them there are, I’ll take what I can get.
Last but not least, in my own musical history anyway, was a less acknowledged but nevertheless important feature of the cassette tape: its blankness. I don’t just mean that it was an empty receptacle on which to collect choice songs; no, I mean “blankness” more prosaically, in that it was without a prefabricated label. It could contain just about any sound out there, but unless you explicitly marked it, there would be no way of knowing what was on there. This made it a perfect method for acquiring music that, technically speaking, I wasn’t allowed to have. In the painstaking years before I became an upperclass(wo)man in high school, I was strictly forbidden from having anything with a Parental Advisory label on it. In retrospect I doubt my mom really cared, but my dad would not have had it. Thank the lord, then, for friends and relatives with more permissive parents, who could not only own the albums I could not, but who could let me borrow them and record them onto cassette so that I could listen to them without my parents being any the wiser. My bestest cousin Aja was lucky enough to have Tupac’s double album All Eyez On Me, which I was obviously not allowed to own, so I dubbed that sucker onto cassette and rocked with it for years without repercussions. (Sadly, I was only able to copy the first disc, so the wonders of “Can’t C Me” and “All Eyez On Me” were to be reserved for a later date.) I was similarly able to acquire The Chronic, Life After Death, and various Sublime albums that would never have made it pass my parental censors.
These memories, and more importantly the music associated with them, are priceless to me. Back in the naughty nineties, getting your hands on the music you needed required effort and commitment, and I was more than ready to put in both. With a couple bucks for blank tapes and the boombox I begged for until my mom couldn’t deal with me anymore, I had all the songs I wanted at my fingertips. On a less nostalgic note, I guess you could say my memories were worth $9.99 a month, which is what it currently costs to have those songs and damn near EVERY OTHER RECORDED SONG IN HUMAN HISTORY available at the click of a button, and I would take that trade-off any day of the week. So while I won’t shame my kids for being the beneficiaries of advances in technology, I will demand that they acknowledge their forebears. They are truly standing on the shoulders of giants, shoulders which once supported boomboxes held aloft to broadcast the most essential musical currency of our time: the cassette tape.
