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Cassette Tape: the B Side of Repurposing Culture and the Anti- Capitalist Local Art Movement in Gainesville, Florida

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Cassette Tape: the B Side of Repurposing Culture and the Anti- Capitalist Local Art Movement in Gainesville, Florida CASSETTE TAPE: THE B SIDE OF REPURPOSING CULTURE AND THE ANTI- CAPITALIST LOCAL ART MOVEMENT IN GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA By RICHARD TYNER A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF MUSIC UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2019 © 2019 Richard Tyner ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the chair and members of my supervisory committee for their mentoring, the staff and members at the UF Libraries for their keen research assistance, the participants in my fieldwork for their honest and open participation. I thank my family for their loving encouragement, which motivated me to complete my study. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................3 LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................5 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................7 Methodology ...........................................................................................................................10 Literature Review ...................................................................................................................12 2 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CASSETTE ...........................................................................16 Playback and Recording Devices ...........................................................................................19 Precursors Art Movements .....................................................................................................22 3 ANTI-CORPORATE CAPITALISM AND THE CASSETTE .............................................28 Piracy ......................................................................................................................................33 Punk Rock and Doing It Yourself ..........................................................................................36 Repurposing ............................................................................................................................45 4 MIXTAPE CULTURE ...........................................................................................................55 Mixtape Meetup - Gainesville, Florida ...................................................................................63 Cassette as Musical Instrument ..............................................................................................70 Nostalgia .................................................................................................................................73 5 PROCESS VALUES AND CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................78 LIST OF REFERENCES ...............................................................................................................90 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................95 4 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 2-1 Diagram of the inside of a cassette ....................................................................................17 2-2 Sony Walkman with attached headphones. .......................................................................18 2-3 TASCAM Portastudio 414 Multitrack Cassette Recorder. ................................................20 3-1 A small selection of Andrew Chadwick’s rarity tape collection. ......................................30 3-2 Side 2 of the Dead Kennedys In God We Trust, Inc. .........................................................39 3-3 Tour bus converted to run on vegetable oil. ......................................................................43 3-4 Stack of cassette holders at the Repurpose Project in Gainesville, Florida. ......................46 3-5 Repurpose Project sign. .....................................................................................................47 3-6 Solar panels at Pulp Arts recording studio. ........................................................................53 4-1 Collection of some of the one-of-a-kind mixtapes from the second Mixtape Meetup in Gainesville, FL...............................................................................................................66 4-2 Mixtape Cover Art. ............................................................................................................69 4-3 Luis Gonzalez’s Deterritory set up including a four-track recorder, 2 dual cassette decks, mixing board and synthesizer. ................................................................................71 5 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Music CASSETTE TAPE: THE B SIDE OF REPURPOSING CULTURE AND THE ANTI- CAPITALIST LOCAL ART MOVEMENT IN GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA By Richard Tyner December 2019 Chair: Larry Crook Cochair: Welson Tremura Major: Music This thesis examines cassette technology and cassette culture’s role in developing and articulating an anti-corporate capitalist stance against the mainstream recording industry in the United States. Primarily, I am interested in understanding how the unassuming cassette became a favored media for expressing anti-corporate capitalist ideology among local communities of alternative musicians. In order to understand the impact of the cassette on local musicians’ efforts to confront the corporate music industry, I focus on a specific community of local alternative musicians in Gainesville, Florida. A small but diverse cassette culture exists in this small university town with multiple sub-groups including avant-garde artists using cassettes as musical instruments, a community of mixtape music enthusiasts who curate and trade compilations of music, and alternative bands that record and then sell cassette tapes of their music during live shows and through social media. The thesis explores cassette culture’s link to a subversive lineage of art and music movements throughout history that have opposed the status quo and the corruption found in capitalistic societies. The democratizing power the cassette had in giving agency to artists that would have otherwise been without, showed how a small cartridge filled with magnetic tape had a profound effect on local musical culture. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION For a small town, Gainesville, Florida has a rich musical history. Tom Petty and Steven Stills are two of the best-known rock musicians to come out of the university town. By the 2000s, Gainesville had become known as a punk rock city holding the annual punk rock festival, Fest and exporting artists such as Hot Water Music, Against Me and Less Than Jake. In 2019, Gainesville’s approximate population was 132,000 with almost half of the population comprising university students. When I was accepted to the University of Florida, the allure for me were the two record shops in town, multiple live music venues and Tom Petty. Upon my arrival, I found a supportive local music scene that spanned genres and heralded many interesting characters. As I dug deeper, I found a subculture of local artists still using cassette tapes as a means of recording and disseminating their own music. Having had a long history using cassettes myself, I saw an avenue worth exploring—an underground to an alternative music scene. As performing musicians, we hold an object in our hands or flex a muscle in our throats to create sound waves that become compressed and rarefied through the air until they reach someone’s ear or dissipate in the distance. However, these sound waves we produce are intangible and lead to, as Richard Middleton discusses, “the otherness of music, it’s ‘ungraspability’ (as compared, say, to material objects).”1 The cassette, just as other physical mediums that transduce music, materialize the sound waves. This provides a way to listen and study music repeatedly. Physical media of the cassette could be thought of as the relationship between the intangible and the tangible, where two worlds collide. Seen from a phenomenological perspective, the physical mediums that carry music is where our 1 Richard Middleton, “Introduction,” in The Cultural Study of Music, ed. Martin Clayton (New York: Routledge, 2012), 13. 7 consciousness becomes a real experience. This essay will look at the experiences of others, as well as my own experiences with the cassette tape to determine its lasting value as well as how it forged its way into a long-lasting culture in Gainesville, Florida. This thesis examines cassette technology and cassette culture’s role in developing and articulating an anti-corporate capitalist stance against the mainstream recording industry in the United States. Primarily, I am interested in understanding how the unassuming cassette became a favored media for expressing anti-corporate capitalist ideology among local communities of alternative musicians. In order to understand the impact of the cassette on local musicians’ efforts to confront the corporate music industry, I focus on a specific community of local alternative musicians in Gainesville, Florida. The initial questions driving my research are: Why do these musicians choose the cassette as the primary
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