Cassette Culture and the Great American Mixtape

In finally settling in to discuss mixtapes, I wanted to write about something both historical and personal this time. For me the mixtape is perhaps the one thing I feel I am really good at doing. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a high art form, especially in the post-cassette world that makes recording so easy. Still, it is an egalitarian form of personal storytelling that I've used since early adolescence to bear my soul to others. I wanted to start out discussing where mixtape culture comes from and then weave this into a short personal history of my relationship with the medium.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, new recording technologies (including the 4 track audio cassette recorder and cassette recorders, cheaper stereo decks, and dual cassette boomboxes) all came onto the commercial marketplace and, as a result, made recording technology 1) vastly more affordable and 2) vastly more widespread. While vinyl continued to be associated with (mostly) major record companies and studios that charged expensive hourly rates and controlled the process, groups of teenagers could pool their money and buy a cheap cassette record or boombox. The concept of ownership of a recording technology, however lo-fi it might be, was revolutionary in its implications. While the internet further democratized music production, the late 1970s and early 1980s was really the first major period where people could produce and consume music on the local level entirely independent of the mainstream recording industry.

~Beginning in the late 1970s, 4 track cassette recorders allowed artists to record their own cassettes, whether as EPs or simply demos, without use of corporate owned studio space. The result was an explosion in new artists and the beginnings of an underground music culture in both Britain and the United States.

Now before discussing personal mixtape culture, I wanted to articulate how underground music cultures utilized this new technology. Both in Britain and America punk (beginning in the late 1970s) and subsequently low fi pop artists in the 1980s took the revolutionary implications of this new recording technology and put them into practice. Prior to this, artists that were seen as being too radical in their message or sound either had their sound diluted and commercialized or were bypassed entirely. By the late 1970s however, punk and other non-commercial artists could reject the mainstream route entirely and record using these new technologies via networks they were setting up in underground scenes. Michael Azerrad in Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 discusses how for Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening, cassette culture was part of a larger revolution that " 'had to do with demystifying the tools of media so access was not restricted' " (459). Part of a larger revolution against hierarchies underlying corporate consumer culture, recording lo-fi on cassette meant autonomy rather than passive consumption, sonic participants rather than cultural captives. In short Calvin Johnson and other lo-fi underground pop artists, as well as anarcho-punk artists before them, saw their work as " 'not just consumption; it's a process of involvement.' " Calvin Johnson also described it as " 'the idea of propagating a resistance to the technically mediated way of consuming your lifetime" and instead making an alternative culture "'...happen right now with you and everybody else in the room' " (460). So lo-fi cassettes became a badge of an underground culture, even a sonic resistance, to a world which expected young people to be captive audiences for top-down corporate media that emanated from metropoles like London, New York, and Los Angeles. It meant making local music. And these new recording technologies made the dream of underground music a possibility. The landscape of America and global music has never been the same.

~Beat Happenings first release, the EP cassette Three Tea Breakfast, was recorded on a boombox during their time in Japan in 1983. Calvin Johnson's associated K Records started a lo-fi pop movement that highlighted the revolutionary potentials of cassette culture.

While different from truly independent, underground music, mixtape culture also emanated from the availability of these same cassette technologies. Their availability transformed passive listeners of corporate-produced music (whether from radio, 8-track, vinyl, or cassette) into active creators of their own sonic stories. You could pop a tape into one side of a boom box and then rip it onto a blank cassette on the other side in a way that was remarkably easy for its time. Elements of cultural piracy and the DIY ethos combined to make music a far more active process for the listener now. Many people before simply bought records that were heavily played on their radio stations, a top-down process of music consumption that truly defined the era of mass consumption from the 1940s through the 1970s. Cassette, CD, MP3, and subsequently internet radio have all been technologies that marked a transition of mass consumption to segmented consumption. Popular music culture has become more particular, more fragmented, and more individualistic that it was 50 years ago. Mixtape culture had a role in making music far less top-down and sonically uniform in contemporary times.

~Dual cassette boomboxes like this 1980s Magnavox model made home recording of personal mixtapes a relatively easy process for home consumers.

Now, I personally didn't grow up in the era of old school cassette mixtapes. I was lucky enough to have access to CD's and computer based burning software. Itunes and illegally downloaded MP3 music gave me a far greater sonic library from which to pull from. Moreover, in the 1990s, old albums from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were being re-mastered and re-issued by both major and independent labels. This re-issue culture turned millennials like myself into connoisseurs of music from decades ago. My dad would always remark, "it weirds me out that you are listening to music that I would play on my 8-track deck in my El Camino back in the day." Having this immense power of retrieval of music from 50 years of popular music did not come about over night. Profound technological changes had to occur for me to be in a position to create these mixtapes. I may not have appreciated this at the time, but I certainly could reap the benefits from decades of underground cassette culture and democratized recording technologies. Some of the charm of the craft is lost in the era of internet radio, but it has turned all of us into our own personal DJ's, a historically significant change in cultural consumption when you think about it.