Anyone who has recently looked around at smaller concerts, at sales figures or Bandcamp pages is unlikely to have missed a certain revival: The audio cassette seems to be back. For the communications scholar Rob Drew, this revival is one of the reasons for and, to a certain extent, the end point of his history of the audio cassette.

In six loosely chronological chapters, Drew traces the development, social negotiation and popular cultural practice of the cassette from the 1950s to the 1990s. His central theme is the question of how it can be explained that the cassette developed into a container of different meanings and ultimately follow a historical path from office item to subcultural sanctuary, while constantly attacked by “big business” as tool for piracy.

In addition to archival sources, his primary material includes fanzines, music magazines and contemporary novels as well as memoirs and published interviews. The geographical focus of the study is squarely and without further discussion on the USA, which makes international developments sometimes seem like an appendage and, above all, fades European particularities into the background. While Drew ostensibly focusses on indie rock, his frequent pointers to other genres like hip hop, metal, punk or electronic music make his findings relevant for contemporary popular music more generally.

Drew’s theoretical considerations are brief and categorise the cassette as a container of different references, experiences and expectations. Firstly, the cassette appears as more than a technological format. It is also a social actor that instigated far-reaching lifeworld consequences for users and, at the same time, an object of their references to meaning and practices (pp. 3–4, 8). Secondly, Drew regards the cassette as a permanent object of dispute between interest groups. This leads him to tell a story of democratisation, empowerment and freedom that was forced through with subcultural practices against the financial interests and copyright claims of the major labels (pp. 12–17). And thirdly, Drew is interested in the function of the cassette as an “indie totem”, i.e. as a symbol of authenticity in a music culture whose scenes were always exposed to the danger of being influenced or “corrupted” by the major labels and instrumentalised the tape as a do-it-yourself banner of self-assurance and resistance (pp. 18–20).

Drew begins his story in the 1950s with the cassette’s predecessor. The open reel tape was primarily used to record significant family events, but did not catch on and did not yet meet with resistance from the music labels. Home taping became simple and affordable with the introduction of the compact cassette by Philipps in 1964 and the company’s decision to release the patent. Young people in particular now used the cheap technology to record the latest pop and rock music from the radio. The boom in tape sales in the late 1960s provoked the aversion of the major labels and their trade organisation, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which tried to politically prevent the (in their eyes) piracy of their music until the 1990s. Drew skilfully frames this dispute by analysing the Congressional hearings and revealing the expectations, desires and fears of all parties regarding cassette between two landmark laws of 1971 and 1992. The former “created a copyright in recordings separate from the compositions and imposed fines […] for violators.” The latter “finally sanctioned analog copying for private, noncommercial use while imposing royalties […] on digital recording devices and formats” (pp. 10–11).

For good reasons, Drew's chronological focus is on the 1980s. He describes how in this decade emerging youth cultures embraced the tape and how the open-contingent recording logic, in contrast to vinyl, fuelled the emergence of new bands, scenes and small cassette labels. In due course, the cassette gained a “value in itself” among young people. This becomes apparent in indie rock. With the genre being characterised by a (deeply contradictory) fear of “selling out”, the cassette successfully established itself as the symbolic technology of “authentic subculture”. This was especially true when influential magazines began to cut back their cassette reviews in the 1990s and parts of the indie scene merged into the “mainstream”. The result was a “not so much silenced as quietly ghettoized” (p. 83) scene, all the more with the cassette as the medium of choice.

Drew explores the far-reaching consequences of the cassette for the indie scene. He follows their de-localisation through bootleg and lo-fi cassette swap networks and spells out the effects of re-recording, such as the fast dissemination of “underground” songs or the stimulation of communities. He attests radio taping accelerating effects on the discovery of new music and looks closely at the link between tape trading and music making, whereby new genres such as indie, hip hop and metal emerged and hybridised. The cassette's advantage of circulating a song that could be listened to over and over again accelerated the formation of a subcultural canon of music and thus the consolidation of an independent genre. It also gave rise to the mixtape, on which songs are put together like musical memories of certain phases of life.

Drew's book is a study by an academic fan, which has advantages but also disadvantages. The wide-ranging information and the empathy with which he describes his subject are exemplary. Anyone who has ever sat in front of the radio to record songs or made mix tapes will recognise themselves in the study. Moreover, the nostalgic approach proves fruitful in explaining the persistence of the cassette and its recent revival. In part, Drew also brings up socio-historical factors such as race, class and gender, for instance when he describes women’s participation in Grrrl cassette networks in Olympia, Washington.

However, Drew’s deep commitment to his own tape trader past also has its downsides. Most importantly, he holds on to a strict mainstream/underground dichotomy, which is at odds with the personal and economic links between the supposedly antagonistic musical worlds. Ample research has convincingly shown that “indie labels” were highly fickle, youth-cultural feel-good zones, whose core desire for “uncommercial” music was just a wish, not something that effectively separated them from “the majors”, whose characterisation as firms that were out to control and exploit creativity is also far too simple.1 The role of persecution and victimisation into which the cassette, and with it subcultural indie rock, is pushed by these assumptions is also a consequence of the choice of sources: The documentation amassed by Congress provides a great deal of factual information, but also suggests a somewhat artificial polarisation between two camps. As a result, “big business” appears very one-dimensional as the enemy and the great obstructor, which could have been differentiated with a closer look at those responsible at labels, in production, on the radio and at the “average” pop and rock consumer in front of his/her recorder. Mainstream and underground would then appear to be a continuum rather than rigid antipodes.

Overall, Drew's book is a refreshingly readable and source-saturated insider’s view into a technological media and its social, economic and cultural implications. It illustrates how technology acted and influenced the everyday practices, communications, cultural self-understandings and social positioning of millions of people – just as the camera did before and as we are currently experiencing with smartphones and social media. It is also a declaration of love to the “good old days” of the cassette with many useful and further-reaching explanatory approaches right up to the present day. However, I can only follow the polarisation of the study to a limited extent and feel that some of its judgements, for instance the label of the cassette as an instrument for democratisation, are too closely resembling youth-cultural tropes.

Note:
1 David Hesmondhalgh, Indie. The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre, in: Cultural Studies 13 (1999) 1, pp. 34–61; Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, London 1999, pp. 35, 58, 60.