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

Home , Band (rock and pop), Burger Records, Cassette culture, Cassette Store Day, Home recording, Mixtape

CASSETTE TAPE: THE B SIDE OF REPURPOSING CULTURE AND THE ANTI- CAPITALIST LOCAL ART MOVEMENT IN GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 recording medium for their music? How did past alternative artistic movements such as Fluxus, Dadaism and Futurism pave the road for cassette culture? How do the musicians see themselves and their art form in relation to a music industry nested within a global capitalistic structure? In what ways do they resist such a structure? How did the technology of cassette recording afford local musicians increased economic agency and become a tool to democratize access to the recording and to the dissemination of music? And lastly, how do the local musicians with whom I worked value their art in relation to the music industry?

My research examines how the cassette played a role in confronting corporate capitalism through unintentional agency, mixtapes, repurposing of old technologies and by highlighting the value of the process in creating art. This chapter introduces my methodology with a literature review and an overview of my research. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of the cassette and on art movements that predated the advent of cassette culture. Each movement, whether Dadaism or

Fluxus, held similar beliefs and acted in opposition to mainstream norms. They all shared the ideas of using art to stand up against or express discontent with their current state of politics in both the art world and the national or global state of affairs. Chapter 3 deals with the cassette’s role in democratizing musical experience in a capitalist society, specifically in America. Broadly speaking, this chapter contends that the cassette was revolutionary in democratizing music recording and the dissemination of recorded music in an industry heavily controlled by a few major actors increasingly constituted as conglomerates, Sony and Universal. The importance of the cassette can be seen in genres such as hip-hop and punk rock that were both elevated if not in part conceptualized with the new cassette technology of the time. However, as new digital technologies emerged and replaced it, the cassette maintained its value in a secondary market as artists and musicians found ways to repurpose the medium. Chapter 4 explores the mixtape subculture within the larger cassette culture. Mixtapes carry a nostalgic value for those in my own generation as well generations before and after. As the precursor to iTunes and Spotify playlists, mixtapes were the first way for music lovers to create their own recorded playlists by reorganizing their favorite songs onto a single cassette. As we will see, this curatorial act was used to create local communities of like-minded people through the advent of tape trading groups. In local communities such as the Mixtape Meetup group in Gainesville, bonds are built within the community by sharing both new music and the social experiences of interaction with like-minded people. Chapter 5 will look at the capitalist belief that people are merely consumers and that art is just a commodity. Similar to the Fluxus art movement’s belief in valuing the process of creating art over the end product, members of Gainesville’s cassette tape community place great value on the creative process itself. Titled “Process Value,” this chapter explores what Thomas Turino calls “flow” or the presence within the creative process of music making

such that it outweighs the financial value of the final recorded product. Or rather, the value of the recorded product can be lessened by the lack of presence in the recorded performance.

Methodology

In my fieldwork I encountered musicians mainly in their 30s and 40s using cassettes as musical instruments in performance contexts; as valued material items to collect, trade, and sell; as technology for everyday use in listening to music. The investigation of the cassette subculture is the basis for my research. My focus is on a local cassette subculture in the city of Gainesville,

Florida, a university town where a thriving DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture exists on the peripheral of the local music scene. My interviews include legendary home taper Hal McGee along with cassette instrumentalist Luis Gonzalez (Deterritory), ethnomusicologist and international recording artist Joachim Polack, local documentarian and noise music artist Andrew Chadwick,

Mixtape Meetup organizer Ilizibith Miller, audio engineer Hanna Nelly and members of the local record label/ artist cooperative Elestial Sound (now known as Pulp Arts). Each represents a piece of the puzzle that makes the Gainesville cassette culture an ebullient and significant music culture.

In this study, I use both emic and etic approaches. Marvin Harris describes the emic approach to anthropological study as “the presence of an actual or potential interactive context in which ethnographer and informant meet and carry on a discussion about a particular domain.”2

This can be contrasted with the etic approach which is limited to an observer’s role. Both approaches are valuable in determining specific ideas, patterns and activities relevant to the research at hand. While my approach to this study has incorporated both emic and etic perspectives, I have emphasized the emic by focusing on making friendships, participating in a

2 Marvin Harris, “History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction,” Annual Review of Anthropology 5, no. 1, 1976, 331.

mixtape trading group and recording the band I presently play in with a four-track cassette recorder. This approach proved both fruitful and complicated. For instance, having access to a culture I am participating in has made gathering data from observation enjoyable and easily accessible. However, my work has been complicated by the fact that I am an active participant in the creative processes that I seek to analyze as a researcher. A major challenge to my emic approach is that by being a part of the culture I effectively am altering it with my own biases and predeterminations. Regardless of my attempts to maintain a non-biased position, the human and social element of this role effects certain observations. The role of researcher also complicates the act of creating and devalues my process of creating. As I will explore later, writing about the process of creation is challenging because the process is valuable in the act of creation and not as much so in the analysis or reflection of that creation. This is not to say the analysis does not carry weight whether in academic circles or in building a researcher’s status in hopes of being published, but I argue that if these goals are our sole focus then we are missing a fundamental aspect of our purpose. I am reminded of John Lennon’s song “Watching the Wheels” and the lyrics of the chorus, “I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round/ I really love to watch them roll.”3 In other words, I see value in the process of the wheels rolling and not just in where they will arrive. Other cliché phrases or quotes such as “Life is a journey, not a destination” all help us to maintain the understanding of our value in a karmic relationship to our everyday lives. There is also a value in the commodity of the objects created in the act, in this case, cassette recordings. When sold, a dollar amount is placed on them, ie., a commercial value.

When bartered, a more complicated value is involved. In such transactions, each individual must agree that the value of what they are offering in exchange is of equal value to what they are

3 John Lennon, “Watching the Wheels,” Double Fantasy, Geffen Records 1980.

receiving or that an understanding that the exchange is a form of support or gift. What this does is build a bond between the two individuals helping to create a sense of community where they decide what is of value as opposed to a larger economic system where the value is decided upon by a government or the Federal Reserve. Yet, determining value has contradictions. I have debated with myself whether to let the art speak for itself as I believe art can do, while wrestling with doing it justice through the written word. Regardless, I have attempted to put into words how and why the process is valuable through my own process.

Literature Review

Timothy Taylor’s The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music and the Conquest of

Culture discusses the exploitation of the power of music by advertisers. Throughout the book

Taylor explains “how commercials were fashioned not only to sell goods and services but also to inculcate listeners and viewers into their roles as consumers.”4 Although he makes no reference to cassettes per se, theoretically he describes facets of the corporate capitalist structure within the music industry that many in cassette culture have long fought against: the soulless merchandizing of consumer goods with music. In another work, Taylor discusses how “workers in the music industry are … victims of neoliberal capitalism” working in a system that has little or no interest in compensating content creators.5 This shows the recording industry’s direct exploitation of the artists and gives good reason for the artists to resist. In Thomas Turino’s book

Music as Social Life, he highlights “flow” in the process of music making. Taken from the observations of positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who coined the term flow in his

4 Timothy Taylor, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music and the Conquest of Culture,(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3.

5 Timothy Taylor, Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 157.

1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Turino describes it as a highly focused mental state. He states, “Flow refers to a state of heightened concentration, when one is so intent on the activity at hand that all other thoughts, concerns, and distractions disappear, and the actor is fully present.”6 Of course, the idea of flow has been around long before Csikszentmihalyi’s coined the term. The idea of flow is interchangeable with Zen or the idea of being present in the moment. Concepts of Zen can be seen in Buddhist teachings that date as far back as the 7th century in the Tang Dynasty of China.7 Many musicians can attest to losing themselves in a performance. Tim Cooley compares this concept to surfing.8 The act of gliding on a wave with the body acting and reacting to each moment the ocean puts in front of the surfer. If focus is lost, falling from the surfboard is likely. Similar to a jam session when musicians are getting lost in the moment of playing their instruments, if focus is lost, the jam can fall apart, and the music may come to an abrupt end needing to be restarted. In Chapter 5, I show how the cassette technology helped to usher in a flow state for recording musicians.

Peter Manuel’s seminal work Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North

India explores the cassette’s “challenge to the one-way, monopolistic, homogenizing tendencies of the ‘old’ media.”9 Written at a time (1993) prior to the digitization of all medias and while cassettes were still a popular technology (CDs had only been around for less than a decade at the time of the book’s printing), Manuel asserts that cassettes “tend to be decentralized in ownership,

6 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 4.

7 Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 215.

8 Timothy J. Cooley, Surfing About Music, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

9 Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2.

control and consumption patterns.”10 The decentralization is the democratization the cassette forged in the recording industry.

Elodie Roy’s Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Grove explores how musical objects write cultural narratives.11 One way this occurs is in the effect the musical object has on a given culture. The cassette tape, as a material musical object, afforded musicians and listeners new ways to record, play back and disseminate music, the effects of which are continued today with services such as iTunes and Spotify playlists, as well as digital recording software such as GarageBand, found in all Apple products. Jonathan Sterne argues that we need to think of sound and culture conjuncturally.12 Sound as a device has changed our view of culture and in turn changed culture. Therefore, the object, a cassette, with the power to record and listen to music placed in the hands of the artists and listeners created a subculture of artists not looking to be the industry’s next big superstars controlled by the major recording labels who previously dictated our listening choices. In addition, the cassette individualized the listening experiences of music consumers in ways that foreshadowed today’s technologies of iPhones and streaming services.

But why, in the digital age of dematerialization, do cassette tapes still occupy a niche for the dissemination and recording of music? What is the worth of the cassette to an artist or to a music community in 2019? Although newer technologies exist, there is still a fascination and a desire to work with older mediums. Unlike the vinyl “resurgence,” cassettes have not made a financially viable comeback, yet there are those that continue to use them and there are those that

10 Manuel, Cassette Culture, 1993, 2.

11 Elodie A. Roy, Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove, (London: Routledge, 2015).

12 Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3.

have recently chosen to adopt them as a medium for their music. My research addresses possibilities for why this is so.

Throughout this essay, the compact audio cassette tape will be referred to as “cassette” though, at times, will be noted simply as the “tape.” When we break down these two terms, we see two materials combined to make one media format. The cassette is the plastic cartridge that houses the magnetic tape wound on spools. Hence the multiplicity of terms used in discussing the compact audio cassette tape. These terms also have rich cultural meaning. For instance, in urban hip-hop culture, due to the popularity of the mixtape, the term tape is used most often. In scholarly circles, we hear the term cassette more regularly. Such examples can be found in Peter

Manuel’s Cassette Culture.13 For the purposes of this essay, these terms will be used interchangeably.

13 Manuel, Cassette Culture, 1993.

CHAPTER 2 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CASSETTE

At the time of the cassette’s invention in the 1960s, reel to reel magnetic tape-recording machines were the primary means to record music in the studio as well as at home. For home tapers, there were challenges to overcome and a level of recording expertise necessary. The machines were large and clunky in comparison to what was to come with cassette recording machines. The magnetic tape came wound on large spools that would easily come undone and lie in a tangled mess. Editing was an involved precarious process where the tape was manually cut with a blade and taped. Valdemar Poulsen first received a patent for magnetic tape recording in

1898, though the use of magnetic tape to record music didn’t become common until the late

1940s into the 1950s with the emergence of electronic amplification.1 Magnetic tape quickly became the standard in recording studios, yet within just under two decades the limitations and level of expertise needed had inventors scratching their heads for ways to improve the recording experience. Enter Lou Ottens and the cassette tape.

When Lou Ottens invented the compact audio cassette in the early 1960s, he was solving a problem. Ottens, who headed a research and development team at the Philips factory in

Hasselt, Belgium, had an idea of how to clean up the mess of the reel to reel: make it smaller and house it inside a cartridge with two spools of tape that could be recorded on and played back.

Ottens and his team drew up plans for a sleek yet durable cartridge.

The cassette has led a contradictory life; initially designed for a capitalist marketplace, it was repurposed as a revolutionary anti-corporate capitalist tool. In the early 1960s, at its inception, there were no lofty aspirations to give agency to artists that opposed the status quo of the major record labels and questioned the profit margins of the music industry. There was no

1 Gordon Mumma, Howard Rye, Barry Kernfeld, and Chris Sheridan, “Recording,” Grove Music Online, 2003.

sense that a small cartridge music medium would help usher in new genres of music or bring together communities in social engagement. The idea that a new technology would spur an underground culture that has continued for forty years or that an old technology would be repurposed in the face of an ecological movement was far from the inventor’s mind. During my research for this thesis, the number one thing people told me when I asked why they continue to work with cassettes: “they are cheap.” The starving artist cliché became a cliché for a reason; many musical artists do not have the money for expensive studio recording productions and often do not prioritize financial gains. Professional recording studio costs anywhere from $100 to $500 per hour plus the cost of a sound engineer to run the often complicated technologies. In contrast, a blank cassette and a modest tape recorder can be resourced for under the cost of one hour of studio time. It is no wonder that many musicians adopted the cassette and still continue to use it.

The cassette itself is a 4x2.5x.5-inch plastic casing or cartridge that houses two spools or reels for eighth inch magnetic tape to spin on at 1 7/8 IPS (inches per second). The sound is transmitted through the tape head by the cassette player from the magnetic tape (Figure 1).

Figure 2-1. Diagram of the inside of a cassette2

2 Leonard P. Kubiak, “Cassette Tape Recorders: A New Breed,” Electronics World 81, no 6, June, 1969. http://www.rfcafe.com/references/electronics-world/cassette-tape-recorders-electronics-world-june-1969.htm

The Philips Company—founded in the late 1800s—struggled in its early years but found success with an electric shaver just following the first World War. Along with their pioneering work in electronics and short-wave radios, the company also created the Philips record label. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no.4 and

Grieg’s Peer Gynt were among the company’s first releases.3 Following the second World War in the early 1960s, the cassette and the cassette recorder brought Philips great success. What made the cassette successful was Philips’s determination to standardize the format. According to head designer, Lou

Ottens, “as long as there was no technical revolution at stake, international standardization of the cassette format (including the speed at which tape would travel across the tape head) became an overriding concern for the Philips company and rightly so. Tape speeds were standardized from 15, 7.5 IPS

(inches per second), 3 ¾ IPS, 1 7/8 IPS.”4 This standardization maintained the cassette’s integrity and became its foothold into the music industry. Without it, other inventors would have been free to design other variations that would have hindered the cassettes early acceptance into the marketplace. With the standardization of the tape speed in place, new technologies in the hardware that recorded and played the cassette (cassette recorders, dual cassette decks and the Walkman) were developed.

Figure 2-2. Sony Walkman with attached headphones.5

3 James Chater, Dave Laing, and Janet Topp Fargion. 2001 “Philips (i).” Grove Music Online. 20 Jul. 2019.

4 Lou Ottens, interview by Bob Dormon, September 2, 3013, “Compact Cassette Supremo Talks to El Reg,” The Register (London: Situation Publishing), 3.

5 Photo by author, January 2019.

Playback and Recording Devices

In 1980, the Japanese company Sony brought the Walkman into the U.S. market as a pragmatic approach to the portable listening of the cassette. The development of the Walkman, specifically, was a major catalyst to the success of the cassette; for the first time there was a small easily mobile way to listen to the music of your own choosing.6 The listening experience shifted with the invention of the portable Walkman. Shuhei Hosokawa describes the invention of the Walkman and its effects on culture as the “years of autonomy.”7 Those years of autonomy are no doubt still upon us with the advent of mp3 players and now our mobile smart phones that store music. Increased autonomy was not restricted to the consumption of music, cassettes also made the production of recorded music more autonomous and democratic. New technologies are often received with wariness and concern for potential negative social and cultural effects and the Walkman’s reception was no different. Hosokawa’s essay “The Walkman Effect” illustrates the concerns of altering social behaviors in discussing the arguments of the effects, “whether men with the Walkman are human or not; whether they are losing contact with reality; whether the relations between eyes and ears are changing radically; whether they are psychotic or schizophrenic; whether they are worried about the fate of humanity.”8 Having been written in

1985, we are able to now see the effects of handheld devices and how they have morphed into the addictive social medias that have infiltrated our social or anti-social lives. Hosokawa’s argument also points out how the loss of our relationship with the natural environment has led to

6 Portable radios using solid-state transistor technology had been introduced to consumers in the early 1960s. The advent of the Walkman, by contrast, allowed for consumers to take their own music with them and not rely on what was being broadcast over the radio waves.

7 Shuhei Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” Popular Music, vol. 4, (1984), 165.

8 Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” 165.

human incommunicability. I would not go so far as to say we are becoming totally incommunicable, but it is an ironic twist of fate that the device (a phone) we originally used to orally communicate has shifted our communication to a digital wall of text messages and emails.

Clive Thompson points out in the July/ August 2019 Smithsonian Magazine, “much like mobile phones, the Walkman tore a rent in the social fabric.”9 It may seem counterintuitive that a device that offers easy access to social media could have negative impacts on our social behavior, but there is no denying the addictive nature in which so many utilize the device. Much of this behavior can be indirectly traced back to cassettes and the first portable device for non-broadcast music listening, the Walkman

Figure 2-3. TASCAM Portastudio 414 Multitrack Cassette Recorder.10

Along with new autonomous listening experiences came new autonomous recording possibilities initially with single track cassette recorders and later with four-track recorders. The development of four-track cassette recorders offered a sophisticated improvement on the original one-track (mono) or two-track (stereo) tape recorders that had become standard. What became marketed as a “portable studio” afforded amateur and professional musicians the ability to produce near-professional multi-track recordings outside the studio: at home. While opting out of

9 Clive Thompson, “The Walkman’s Invention 40 Years Ago Launched a Cultural Revolution,” Smithsonian Magazine, July/ August 2019, 27.

10 Photo by author, January 2019.

one branch of the music industry (professional recording studios and major recording labels),

DIY musicians simultaneously capitalized on the industry’s technological hardware advancements in the consumer and prosumer marketplaces.

In 1971, TEAC (Tokyo Electro Acoustic Company), a Japanese-based electronics company, brought their recording equipment to market in the United States. TEAC Audio

Systems Corp launched in America as TASCAM (TEAC Audio Systems Corp AMerica).

According to Mark Roland, “in 1979, TASCAM released the Portastudio 144, a four-track machine that used cassette tapes playing at double speed to increase sonic quality. For the first time, four-track recording was in the hands of people who could scrape together a few hundred quid, rather than several thousand.”11 The usability of these multi-track cassette recorders represented an intermediate step between the modest single-track tape recorder and the state-of- the-art sixteen or twenty-four track consoles used in professional studios, falling in the semi- professional (prosumer) realm of music recording. These user-friendly machines allowed a musician working at home to produce a high-quality recording without advanced training in audio engineering and without the financial investment needed for a professional recording studio. For instance, even the most basic models of the four-track recorder included the ability to equalize and pan left or right on each track. In addition, the technique called “bouncing tracks” allowed musicians to achieve more than four tracks. The process of bouncing entails recording on three open tracks, then mixing those three tracks together onto the fourth track. This process makes three tracks available to be “overdubbed” (recorded over). Bouncing tracks can be employed again with two tracks bounced to the third, transforming a four-track recorder into an eight-track recorder. This process of overdubbing multiple tracks offered solo artists the ability

11 Mark Roland, “Until Hiss Said Stop,” Electronic Sound, no. 46, (October 2018), 43.

to create, manipulate, and add complex textures and additional parts to songs that would otherwise not be available without multiple performers. The end result can then be mixed and recorded to a single channel tape deck (the ones used by most consumers) for playback. In the chapter discussing the value of process over end product, I will discuss in further detail my own experiences with using a four-track recorder.

Precursors Art Movements

To better understand contemporary cassette culture as a movement of resistance to corporate capitalism, we can first look to the earlier artistic movements that contemporary cassette users cite as influential movements that shared a similar philosophy and approach to their medium and resisted and confronted capitalism or the status quo. Such art movements can be thought of as art cultures, each with a group of cohorts utilizing specific artistic media and sharing similar philosophical approached to producing their art. The art cultures that inspired contemporary cassette culture philosophically opposed non-egalitarian (upper class galleries) and corporate (recording studios and record labels) control of art production.

The Fluxus Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was mentioned in many of the interviews conducted during my fieldwork in Gainesville. Fluxus was founded by Lithuanian born American artist, George Maciunas who maintains, “Fluxus was a global collective of artists, musicians, designers bound by their intermedia sensibility and experimental enlightenment.”12 In defiance of the elite art communities that were controlled by galleries and critics, the Fluxus movement held the view that anyone can be an artist. This is a sentiment shared with cassette culture. Hal McGee states, “what makes the worldwide cassette movement so unique is that it is

12 http://georgemaciunas.com/about/

a society of real participants, producers instead of passive consumers.”13 Their goal was an egalitarian one in bringing the sensibilities of artistic life into the everyday. Art was also used as a political platform to relay messages of nonconformity including anti-war themes and sentiments. Notable members of Fluxus in the 1960s included John Lennon, Yoko Ono and John

Cage. Their philosophy was to put the process of art making over the final artistic product. Many performance art pieces spawned from this philosophy including Yoko Ono’s famous Cut Piece in which she sat on stage while the audience participated in cutting her clothes away. According to artist and freelance writer Tracy DiTolla,

Fluxus was a loosely organized group of artists that spanned the globe but had an especially strong presence in New York City. George Maciunas is historically considered the primary founder and organizer of the movement, who described Fluxus as, “a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp.” Like the Futurists and Dadaists before them, Fluxus artists did not agree with the authority of museums to determine the value of art, nor did they believe that one must be educated to view and understand a piece of art. Fluxus not only wanted art to be available to the masses, they also wanted everyone to produce art all the time. It is often difficult to define Fluxus, as many Fluxus artists claim that the act of defining the movement is, in fact, too limiting and reductive.14

The Fluxus movement was partially inspired by the egalitarian-tinged arts and crafts DIY

(Do-It-Yourself) subculture that dated back to the 19th Century. In the 1970s, the Do-It-Yourself concept was adopted heavily in punk rock music as well as into cassette culture. According to

Ian Staub, “The do-it-yourself ethos that permeated the culture’s practical and ideological logics led to the assumption of creative roles in music that were previously limited to trained professionals.”15 This goes hand in hand with the Fluxus philosophy that anyone can be an artist.

13 Robin James, ed. Cassette Mythos, (New York: Autonomedia), 1992, VIII.

14 Tracy DiTolla, “Fluxus Movement Overview and Analysis,” Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors, January 21, 2012. https://www.theartstory.org/movement-fluxus.htm

15 Ian Matthew Staub, “Redubbing the Underground: Cassette Culture in Transistion,” (master’s thesis, Weslyan University, 2010), 86.

Many artists spend years and financial resources honing their skills, while others without much time or money invested, create with whatever tools and inspiration they have available to them.

This debate over what is considered art no longer was in the hands of an elite class and ran counter to mainstream beliefs in art and music. Fluxus as well as cassette culture drew inspiration from opposing the control of the elite class of gallery owners and major record labels to determine what was (and was not) to be considered art. The program notes of a 2009 exhibition titled DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Generation read:

The concept of Do It Yourself began as a philosophy related to the American Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century in which a search for an authentic, meaningful style was carried out as a reaction to the “soulless” aesthetic that developed out of the Industrial Revolution. A DIY subculture soon followed, explicitly critiquing modern consumer culture while encouraging people to take technologies and civic responsibilities into their own hands to solve needs. The exhibition examines how the Fluxus movement of the 1960s applied the DIY philosophy to practice, establishing an interdisciplinary, anti-art approach directed towards bridging the gap between artist community and society… Fluxus described a movement with origins in Futurist theater, silent film, Zen, comedy, vaudeville, and Dada. The movement aimed to interrupt the rigidly hierarchal, formalist conventions of postwar art and the burgeoning commodity culture of the 1960s. Critical to Fluxus’ DIY objective was a reconstruction of the arts from a context of consumer culture and passive reception to an active culture of engagement. Artists collectively viewed themselves as social catalysts carrying out communal projects that pioneered the exploration of artistic collaboration, ‘intermedia,’ sexual politics, and racial diversity.16

Two influential precursors to Fluxus were Dadaism and Futurism. Dadaism (1916 - 1922) was a reaction to the corruption, nationalism, repression and conformity that the artists believe resulted in World War I. It is likely that the Fluxus art movement also arose when it did due to another time in history when war, this time the Vietnam War, was the catalyst for counterculture protest. As an art movement, Dadaism rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern

16 http://fluxusfoundation.com/archive/about-yoko-fluxus-foundation-archive/d-i-y-do-it-yourself-group-exhibition- 2009/

capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest. Some notable figures of the movement include Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali.

Also, in the lineage is Futurism, an early 20th-century—originally Italian—art and music movement that also rejected the established tradition and valued youth, speed and technology. As new machines spawned by the Industrial Revolution roared, artists and musicians heard new music and used experimental sounds inspired by the new machinery of everyday life. In the Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo writes of noise machines he designed after hearing machines in the sonic landscape as a revolution of sound and a turning point in composition. Again, in Russolo’s conception, an artist did not need to be trained, rather an open mind was all that was needed to hear the everyday sounds of their surroundings and convert them into music. Russolo stated that he was “unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring.”17 The will to be daring along with the lack of concern for professional training is a common thread throughout the ethos of these oppositional art cultures extending into cassette culture. For instance, my interviewee, Luis Gonzalez, films and records sounds from his daily life for his live performances. His field recordings include standing on a bridge and filming the traffic passing below him which he projects on a screen behind him during his performances. He records sounds to be manipulated by slowing down or speeding up the cassettes that the sounds have been recorded on while using other effects such as delay and reverb to create ambient textures of sound as compositions. He often does this improvised live.

In one performance, he placed contact microphones on a metal sculpture and created sound by hitting and shaking the sculpture which then went through a tape machine to be manipulated.

There is an inherent risk of something going wrong in these live settings and the artistic risk is

17 John L. Walters, “The Noise of Art,” The Guardian, 2000.

what makes his performances so exciting. It also gives what would be an otherwise mechanical noise a human element that an audience can feel. Hal McGee records his everyday experiences whether at a bus stop or walking down the street and assembles them into collages of sound he calls “audio folk art dictaphone assemblages.” He has abandoned cassettes recently and now uses four Sony ICD-PX470 stereo digital dictaphones. One for each week of the month. At the end of the month he records them into his computer all at the same time with no editing. He posts the final result to his own website and to Bandcamp pages.1819 During one conversation, Hal McGee told me that he drew his idea to record everyday sounds directly from his interest in the Fluxus art movement.

Much of the current noise music scene that cassettes are widely used in was in part due to

Russolo’s early experimentations. Flora Dennis’s article cites Richard Strauss’s use of dissonance as a “justification” for Russolo’s own compositions, linking Strauss to current noise musicians.20 Just how Russolo choose to use noise carries significant weight. He was not attempting to use noise as background ambience sound to his compositions, “but rather as raw material for [author’s emphasis] composition.”21 Other prominent artists such as John Cage were heavily influenced by the futurist movement. McGee, Gonzalez and other current noise artists follow in these footsteps.

The precursors to the Fluxus art movement were motivated by social as much as they were artistic goals. They were also all non-conforming and oppositional to the mainstream of their time. The links of these arts movements to cassette culture is perhaps most direct in their

18 http://www.haltapes.com/

19 https://halmcgee.bandcamp.com/ 20 Flora Dennis and Jonathan Powell, “Futurism,” Grove Music Online, 2001.

21 Dennis, “Futurism,” 2001.

non-conformity and in their aesthetics and philosophical viewpoints. My research has shown many overlapping values between Fluxus, Dadaism, Futurism and cassette culture. Although,

Fluxus, Dadaism and Futurism occurred years before cassettes became a popular medium, the culture of cassettes grew organically carrying on the ethos of revolution and resistance that has been with us as far back as history has recorded. In each of these art movements, the one constant is this ethos of opposition. In the case of cassettes, the ethos of resistance manifested into an anti-corporate position taking on the major recording industry and carving a path for many artists to create and share their music.

Defining art or art culture through linguistic means as stated above is limiting, reductive and often the antithesis of the art that is created which is what makes understanding and writing about it so challenging while intriguing and insatiable. Communicating ideas is imperative and so we attempt to define to help understand and learn. It can also help us map out a timeline to understand where we came from, where we are currently and potentially where we are going as a culture of artists. The current state of cassette culture would not be as well understood without examining previous artistic movements that encapsulate a similar ethos and process.

CHAPTER 3 ANTI-CORPORATE CAPITALISM AND THE CASSETTE

Timothy Taylor’s book Music and Capitalism shares the story of Burger Records from an ethnomusicolgist’s point of view. The small independent record label from Fullerton, California was predicated on cassette releases. According to Taylor, Burger’s choice to release its music on cassettes confronts new technologies as “a way of resisting the hype of the latest music technology and digital format.”1 This kind of resistance is not uncommon amongst the cohorts of cassette users I researched in Gainesville. Many grew up in the digital age and are well aware of the seemingly limitlessness of new technologies and rather prefer limitations in the creation of their art. Taylor also conveys the political implications of Burger’s resistance to new technologies as, “a way of not being pulled into today’s neoliberalized, informationalized universe in which the personal computer has turned us all into clerks, administrators and technocrats.”2 This attitude is also shared by the local actors in Gainesville as a way of practicing self-reliance. The resistance is used as a form of identifying one’s self outside of the mainstream arts economy that is controlled by major corporations. With music, the corporations are

Universal, Warner, and Sony.

The history of the recording industry is filled with examples of exploitation, whether exemplified in early race records where African American artists received a nominal fee to record but earned no royalties of sales or in using sexualized images of female artists to sell music. The recording industry acts primarily as an investment firm disguised as a development company for artists. As capital investment, major record labels attempt to keep the risk for their investment low by following patterns that have proven successful in the past. These practices,

1 Taylor, Music, 175.

2 Taylor, Music, 175.

whether in the choice of artist to be signed or the marketing strategies employed to sell their musical products, result in creative innovation and exploration of new and original content in sound being diminished. Terrestrial radio has become dominated by a handful of companies such as Clear Channel all churning out similar playlists homogenizing the music we commonly hear.

According to the website Reclaim Democracy, by 2002 Clear Channel owned 1225 radio stations across the country and behaved in monopolistic activities.3 The lack of diversity and local flavor of music that is played on commercial radio has long been considered culturally detrimental. The actors in this study are outsiders and as such do not see themselves as participants in the mainstream music industry. Rather, they have developed their own micro industries or musical scenes that function as an antithesis to the major label recording and music industry. These artists have helped to diversify the music available for consumption only on a small scale where the audience must be proactive in seeking it out. Before the advent of the internet, mixtapes and tape trading were alternative vehicles for the spread of new music.

Cassettes offered outsider artists that companies were unwilling to invest in an opportunity to create and record their music away from the stronghold major labels held. For this reason, many avant-garde and experimental artists adopted the format. Noise artists are the greatest example of this. In Gainesville, Florida one such artist, Andrew Chadwick, known in the local noise scene as Ironing, works autonomously in the truest sense of doing it himself. Not only can he be found at a local show almost every night of the week documenting the shows with his video camera, he also has his own record label featuring artists he believes deserve a chance and he puts on the Action Research concert series, which to date has produced over two hundred shows. These Action Research shows founded by Chadwick and Hal McGee support local

3 Jeff Perlstein, November 2002. http://reclaimdemocracy.org/clear_channel_backlash/

Gainesville musicians as well as small touring acts. Chadwick curates, books, promotes and often performs under the moniker Ironing at these shows. His sets often include a Walkman and boomboxes played as musical instruments. He is also an avid collector of cassettes. In my interview with him he shared his passion for the format.4

Figure 3-1. A small selection of Andrew Chadwick’s rarity tape collection.5

Contradictions of the cassette’s role as both a new technology and revenue stream within the capitalist music industry and as a democratizing tool of grassroots artistic activity are plenty.

The commercial releases were put out on cassette making it the dominant format in music media by the mid 1980s - early 1990s contributing to the subsequent fall of the vinyl LP.

The machines that played cassettes had a profound impact on this democratization due to one simple element that most cassette players came with and a major difference to LP record players: the ability to record. The original cassette recorders were designed to be voice transcribers and were often used to send audio letters; most came with a microphone built in.

4 Andrew Chadwick (Gainesville musician), in discussion with the author, January 31, 2019.

5 Photo by author, January 2019.

From this simple thought in the design process a snowball effect took place for artists and consumers alike to take advantage of in ways never previously imagined. For starters, blank tapes (i.e., without pre-recorded music) were used by consumers to record music off of radio programs or from previously purchased LPs. In continuation of this act, musicians also used blank cassettes to record their own music and to share in ways of their own choosing.

I interviewed Hal McGee about his involvement with cassette home taping in the 1980s.

He informed me that he found the freedom to create a powerful catalyst for his use of the cassette. He lived in Indianapolis prior to moving to Gainesville where he now holds a full-time job at the University of Florida’s Shands hospital. Music doesn’t pay his bills, but his prolific output continues with his Apartment Music live series and his Folk-Art Audio Assemblages. His assemblages are then made available online and on CD. The result is a smattering of sounds from his daily life including the sounds of his dog, his bus ride to work and the sounds of the hospital where he works to name a few. He no longer uses a cassette recorder but now opts for four digital handheld (name of technology) recorders, one for each week of the month. He told me his move away from cassettes was partly because he feels no allegiance to the format and also that much of his popularity is overseas and he found it less expensive to mail CDs or use his

Bandcamp and his own website to distribute his music. According to Discogs website, McGee became known as “one of the most important and seminal members of an early homemade cassettes musical movement.”6 McGee wasn’t necessarily out to fight the music industry but, as he told me during an interview, he used cassettes for economic reasons.

Certainly, my use of cassette technology in the 1980s was an economic choice. Many of us who did cassette back then were relatively poor. We did cassettes because it was what we could afford. That's the simplest way to put it. Producing a record was beyond our means. It took a certain amount of dollars, several hundred to thousands, and you had to have a certain amount made. To make that

6 Discogs Profile of Hal McGee, https://www.discogs.com/artist/424754-Hal-McGee.

feasible you had to be able to sell them. And according to my ways of thinking then and now, in order to sell anything you have to convince people that it's worth buying. That often means, but of course not always, compromising your artistic vision. So, the fact that we could produce only cassettes gave us a sense of freedom. By using the cassette medium we had the choice to make as many or as few copies as we wanted... with the emphasis on “as few.” That means we could try anything!7

McGee was operating in a world where the creation of his art was an everyday experience.

Although, he states his choice to use cassettes early on was an economic one since it was within his means, there is also a more abstract reason for his use of the cassette. Jacque Attali states, “to use a well-worn Marxian formula, economics is generally considered to be a science of the base or infrastructure, whereas music traditionally counts among the most rarefied, abstract, and specialized of all superstructural activities.”8 What Attali is pointing out here is the idea of a separation between economics and music. While much music has been commodified, there is still a contingent that exists outside the economic restraints that McGee is a part of. And in cassette culture, the distinction between economics and art is exploited and subverted through bartering.

The bartering (trading) of tapes between artists developed a secondary market that, for participants, holds more cultural capital rather than financial value. Tape trading also works socially to build musical communities of like-minded individuals (a music scene). By the late

1970s into the early 1980s, the affordability and availability of blank cassettes allowed artists to take the production process into their own hands while sidestepping the music industry. The availability, ease of use and relatively low cost of the technology increased the agency of artists

7 Hal McGee (Gainesville musician), in discussion with the author, January 25, 2019.

8 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), vii- viii.

that otherwise would not have been able to afford professional recording studio costs or lacked the skill set of audio engineering.

Prior to the cassette’s prominence in the recording industry, there was little chance for an individual artist to record their own music without a great deal of money and technical know- how. Although there were other methods of taking the business side of music making into the artist’s hands, the cassette was a revolutionary technological vehicle that allowed artists to control the recording, marketing and distribution of their own music. Now an artist was able to free themselves from the bloated promotional and marketing expenses major labels demanded by manufacturing and duplicating their music on their own terms; an essential part of the DIY movement within cassette culture. With its ease of use, accessibility and low cost, artists could now record their music and distribute it out of the “trunk of their car.” The beginnings of hip-hop music can be found within mixtape culture in just this way and will be discussed later in the

Mixtape chapter. In essence, cassette tape technology afforded musicians the power to record and disseminate their own music. It also allowed for secondary market purveyors to create and sell bootleg versions of commercial releases of the music industry.

Piracy

Those in power in the music industry did not take home-taping (as it was called) lightly.

In a 1985 article in the New York Times, music critic Jon Pareles stated, “The Coalition to Save

America's Music… asserted that the recording industry loses sales of $1.5 billion a year to home taping.”9 The practice of home tapping became so prevalent in the 1980s in both the U.S. and the

U.K that a campaign titled “Home Taping is Killing The Music Industry” was spearheaded by

9 Jon Pareles, “Issue and Debate; Royalties on Recorders and Blank Audio Tapes,” New York Times, November 21, 1985.

the recording industry trade groups Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the

British Phonograph Industry (BPI).

Of course, with this ease of cassette duplication came the threat of piracy of copyrighted material. For a nominal fee, a modest cassette recorder could be purchased to record (transfer) the music of any artist from the radio or an LP and then manufacture duplicate copies on blank tapes in one’s own home through the duplication process known as “dubbing.” The concept of dubbing originated in the film industry when sound was introduced to silent films. Its etymology can be linked to the doubling or duplicating of sound into film reels. Cassette culture adopted the term when dual cassette recorders (for recording from one tape to another) came to the consumer market, and the ease of duplicating one’s favorite album to share became accessible from home.

Most often, the concern expressed over piracy is that artists are getting cheated out their fair share of royalties for their intellectual property. However, using the threat of piracy as a subversive weapon against the control of dominant media is not often brought up. Piracy is a double-edged sword in this way. Artists do lose out on royalty payments when their work is illegally copied but they also simultaneously benefit from having their music circulated through a passionate circle of music lovers. The double-edged sword also works in the favor of underground artists against major record labels who also lose revenue from the sale of recordings and therefore lose their control of revenue streams from the music that is disseminated.

The redistribution of pre-recorded commercial bootleg cassettes also became prominent in countries that had weak or nonexistent recording industries. Countries in Southeast Asia and

Africa to this day have what can be called a “secondary market” or an “imagined market,” where the peddling of pirated knock-off cassettes is commonplace and often overlooked by local authorities. These piracy practices came out of necessity as many of the prerecorded commercial

releases were out of reach of common citizens due to their high cost. Of course, the producers and/or artists whose music was being pirated were also losing out on royalties. As one Nigerian juju musician told ethnomusicologist Christopher Waterman, “The record pirates make all the money, saving little for us and nothing for the government. It is ridiculous that in a country of over 80 million people, a successful musician cannot boast that his record would sell over one million.”10 Moreover, from the purveyor’s side, “music should not be only for the rich men alone, poor people should also enjoy good music.”11 Both arguments hold weight. Peter

Manuel’s Cassette Culture explores the insurgence of the cassette into the culture of North India and asserts that cassettes “revolutionized patterns of control, consumption, and the dissemination of the relevant media.”12 Throughout the 1980s, two of the largest actors in the North Indian music industry were HMV (His Master’s Voice) and T-Series. The latter came to be in 1979 to satisfy a demand HMV could not fulfill, though their practices were fraught with allegations of piracy and shady business moves. One such story includes T-Series switching out their inferior magnetic tape with a Singapore competitor, EMH, and housing the inferior tape in EMH labeled cassette casings, discrediting the competitor while boosting their reputation as purveyors of a quality product. In socialist countries, the cassette also appears to have played an oppositional role. But rather than opposing a capitalist music industry, it became an avenue to provide listeners access to music that was outside of the state’s control. According to Dave Laing,

“cassette recordings constituted a ‘second market’ for popular music throughout the socialist

10 Christopher Waterman, Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 152-153.

11 Waterman, Jùjú, 152-153.

12 Manuel, Cassette Culture, 257.

bloc, providing audiences with music excluded from the official repertoire, both locally created and foreign.”13

While the examples cited above provide reasoning to the argument that the cassette worked against the tide of corporate capitalism (or the skirting around of it) and state control, the democratization that the cassette pushed forward in the American music industry also stimulated the development of new forms of music. Reagan era politics in the late 1970s into the 1980s helped generate an angry youth movement of music we now call punk. Punk rock was essentially a musical push back against corporate takeover of American and world culture.

Punk Rock and Doing It Yourself

Mike Watt, of the early 1980s punk rock band Minutemen from San Pedro, California, declares in an anthemic scream with his fist raised at the end of his shows, “Start your own band!” This has become a battle cry for the do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk rock music. Hal

McGee states a similar sentiment in the forward to Cassette Mythos, “It’s time to create your own vision, your own legends.”14 This sentiment is the backbone of the do-it-yourself ethos prevalent throughout cassette culture. There is no need for formal training or virtuosic skill. With a blank cassette and a cassette recorder, anyone can create their own music. Gainesville musician Luis Gonzalez maintains that it was punk rock that made him realize he could be a musician at the age of 15. Originally starting out as a drummer in punk bands, Gonzalez left

Gainesville for Portland, Oregon and flirted with free jazz and noise core which brought him to using cassettes as instruments in his solo experimental project now known as Deterritory back in

Gainesville. In the noise rock band Videoleg that both Gonzalez and I are members, we’ve

13 Dave Laing, “Music and the Market: The Economics of Music in the Modern World,” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., edited by Martin Clayton, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 295.

14 James, Mythos, VIII.

incorporated tape loops to run between songs when performing live. Gonzalez has specific cassettes designed to loop with his own assembled field recordings that he triggers with a foot switch connected to a Panasonic VSC RR-830 Standard Cassette Dictation Machine that I picked up from a local thrift store.

It could be argued that punk rock would have happened without the cassette, but there is no doubt that the cassette and the do-it-yourself aesthetic played important roles in punk rock’s evolution. Mike Watt waxed poetically when interviewed in Cassette: A Mixtape Documentary,

“it’s the potential; here is the cassette, here is the recording machine. It’s in your hands. I like that. There isn’t just one way to do it, one type of music… and maybe that’s why punk came around because of the cassette experience.”15 To further exemplify the ties between punk rock, the cassette, and the DIY aesthetic within an anti-corporate capitalist structure, Watt goes on to say, “you could write your own story, paint your own picture… sing your own song and you didn’t need to be swimming in [gestures with his fingers the sign for money], you could be econo.”16 Many other factors were in place for this new genre to come about, but without the cassette many would be without the means to record and distribute this new music. “Econo” is a significant term. In Minutemen’s song “The Politics of Time” from their seminal 1984 album,

Double Nickels on the Dime, the first use of the term is found in the lyric “we jam econo.”17 This references the stripped-down, economic nature in which the band recorded and produced their music as well as a nod to the fact that their songs, averaging just over a minute in length, can economically express a poignant message in a short amount of time. It also combatted the idea

15 Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape, Directed by Zack Taylor, Gravitas Ventures, 2016.

16 Cassette, Taylor, 2016.

17 Minutemen, “The Politics of Time,” Double Nickel on the Dime, SST Records, 1984.

that a popular hit song had to be three minutes. Social theorist Jaques Attali discusses such short songs with the idea that listeners only have the capacity to handle so much information in a period of time, what he calls Use-Time. His theory is based on the idea that we are attempting to listen to every song ever created, an impossible task. The idea of “econo” as seen through the punk rock lens is more based on the attempt to get a point across in a succinct direct manner, whilst spending the least amount of money (and time) to do so. This also negates Attali’s concept of Exchange-time or the time we spend earning money in order to purchase music. Creating music and being “econo” became a philosophy within the punk rock do-it-yourself aesthetic.

Whether out of economic necessity or not, the cassette became a vehicle to record and disseminate music economically and matched perfectly with the do-it-yourself aesthetic.

According to John Held Jr., “Punk wasn’t entertainment… It had more to do with youth seizing control of their own lives, participating at their own party by doing-it-themselves. Punk zines became the samizdat of a culture that wanted nothing to do with the mainstream.”18 The

“seizing of control” that Held refers to is the youth’s show of force to resist the corporate music industry. This mentality is what has brought many members of the cassette culture together with a cause to rally around. Not only was the cassette confronting corporate capitalism, now the music on the cassette was spreading the message in a broader anti-capitalist context. The lyrical content of many punk rock songs expressed this belief resisting the commercialization and commodification of music. The Minutemen’s song “Shit from An Old Notebook” states this blatantly, “Let the products sell themselves/ fuck advertising, commercial psychology/ psychological methods to sell should be destroyed.”19 While this might be interpreted as a

18 John Held Jr., “DADA TO DIY: The Rise of Alternative Cultures in the Twentieth Century,” http://fluxusfoundation.com/essays/dada-to-diy-the-rise-of-alternative-cultures-in-the-twentieth-century/

19 Minutemen, “Shit from an Old Notebook,” Double Nickel on the Dime, SST Records, 1984.

snarky rebellious cry the significance is much deeper. This lyric clearly points out the resistance to how the system of the major label industry works and draws a line in the sand that the status quo is not how these musicians want to pursue their musical endeavors.

To take this a step further, the reaction to the Recording Industry Association of America

(RIAA) and the British Phonograph Industry (BPI) “Home Taping Is Killing The Record

Industry” campaign from the punk rock community, specifically the Dead Kennedys and Jello

Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles record label was to leave a side of their cassette release of In God

We Trust, Inc. blank encouraging those that purchased the album to help in taking profits away from the record industry. Along with the snide attitude and clever anti-marketing this exhibits,

Alternative Tentacles drew a clear line that they were not a participant in the corporate record industry and saw a way to prove it by leaving a side of their cassette blank with the words,

“HOME TAPING IS KILLING THE RECORD INDUSTRY PROFITS! WE LEFT THIS SIDE

BLANK SO YOU CAN HELP.”

Figure 3-2. Side 2 of the Dead Kennedys In God We Trust, Inc.20

20 Photo by Tapeheadcity, “Photo of Dead Kennedys Cassette,” Instagram, May 10, 2019 Accessed May 10, 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/BxQXRKKAkw4/.

Another blatant example of an artist using the cassette to give agency to the listener is

English new wave artist Bow Wow Wow’s song “C30, C60, C90 Go” (referring to types of blank tapes) give reasons and ways to record music directly off the radio as their lyrical content.21 As Andrea F. Bohlman and Peter McMurray assert “Its chorus was essentially a user manual for circumventing the recording industry: ‘C30 C60 C90 Go / Off the radio, I get a constant flow / Hit it, pause it, record it and play / Turn it, rewind and rub it away.’”22 These examples show how artists who had recognized the democratizing power of the blank cassette shared their ideas to their audiences in an attempt to spread the message of anti-corporate capitalism, something at the core of punk rock values.

Dave Laing concludes his book, One Chord Wonders, writing, “Punk rock was a genre shot through with paradox at every level. It contained elements of a subculture and of an avant- garde, the one building identity, the other subverting it… punk rock’s moment of triumph was brief, though its effects were, and remain, far-reaching.”23 This statement relates to the cassette as well. The cassette was an element of punk rock, and it was also a vehicle for the philosophical idea of punk rock. Looking at the subculture that exists within the cassette culture today we can see the “far-reaching” effects, as artists continue to use the cassette as an economic alternative to the major record label industry. These acts or lyrical messaging may at first seem petty and rebellious, but with further examination, it is a deep act of subversion to have the ability to control the means of recording and disseminating an artist’s music without the heavy hand of

21 Bow Wow Wow, “C30, C60, C90 Go,” Original Recordings, EMI Records, 1A 064-64 890, 1982.

22 Andrea F. Bohlman and Peter McMurray, “Tape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic Regime,” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 1, 2017, 18.

23 Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), 131.

corporate recording labels. Laing also mentions that “punk rock possessed an impulse to construct an identity that would be an alternative to the institutionalized or passé identities of the status quo.”24 The cassette offered an alternative recording and dissemination method to the status quo that was controlled by major record labels while developing an identity for alternative artists who chose to opt out of the music industry and chart their own path. Further, in discussing the issue of artists charting their own courses Attali states, “‘doing it to yourself’ also implies knowing how to ‘do it for yourself,’ and the new technology is at least neutral to the degree that it could also, conceivably, be used for a collective political project of emancipation.”25 The idea of doing something for yourself is empowering to the youth who led this movement. The value of this emancipation will also be discussed in chapter 4.

In the do-it-yourself context, tape recorders were used to record amateur musicians’ music, making the expensive recording studio, controlled by the major recording labels, superfluous to this cohort of the self-motivated and industrious musicians. As Pareles contends,

“The artistic freedom, low cost, privacy and spontaneity of cassette recording have encouraged thousands of performers to bypass the music business and do it themselves.”26 This freedom and spontaneity helped develop the identity for committed artists looking to create music on their own terms. Teenagers playing in garage bands could stick a single-track cassette recorder in the middle of the garage, press record, perform and record their songs. The outcome, regardless of recorded sound quality, was their own music on a tape that could be played back in a car or

Walkman.

24 Laing, One Chord, 131.

25 Attali, Noise, xiii.

26 Pareles, “Record-It-Yourself,” 1.

In an interview, Davis Hart, a founding member of the record label/ artist cooperative

Elestial Sound in Gainesville, discussed why the cooperative release many of their artists’ music on cassette. He told me that cassettes are an inexpensive way for an artist to have something to sell at live shows and while the payback isn’t great, an artist can make enough to pay for gas to get to the next town on tour. He also expressed the positive idea of providing a “momento” for an audience member to take home with them after the show.27 He maintains many audience members also find it an inexpensive way to show their support for a band. Hart’s comments about the role of the cassette as merchandise for the live performances of Elestial Sound artists mirrors a broader pattern for contemporary musicians. According to Cici Moss, “Tapes now function as a basic form of patronage between musicians and their audience; since a physical format is no longer necessary to send or receive music, these objects become a gesture of support.”28

Davis Hart grew up listening to his father’s record collection and has played in bands for the majority of his adult life. He grew up in St. Augustine, Florida and has toured extensively with his band LightHouse Music. His father, Mike Hart, was a professional musician who taught

Davis to play guitar and bass at a young age. In an interview published in the Gainesville Sun,

Hart discusses his father’s influence on his musical understanding, “before I was even in elementary school, he would talk about the concepts behind why a song was good, breaking it down on intellectual, mathematical, physical and emotional levels…He taught me how to listen.”29 Davis, named after Miles Davis, is an avid Bob Dylan fan. He shared with me that after

27 Davis Hart (Elestial Sound/ Pulp Arts founder), in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, August 12, 2019.

28 Cici Moss, “101 Cassette Labels,” Rhizome, August 19, 2009. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/aug/19/101- cassette-labels/

29 Tyler Francischine, “Creative Gainesville: The Sound and the Vision,” Gainesville Sun, Jun 2, 2017.

listening to Dylan on his father’s records for countless years, he recalled the first time he heard a

Bob Dylan cassette and what a new listening experience it was with the differing speeds and warbles of the tape running through the cassette. Prior to the evolution of the Elestial Sound cooperative into a new organization named Pulp Arts, Davis ran Elestial Sound as a legal cooperative and steered the label to act as environmentally responsible as possible. For instance, he converted old school buses to run on vegetable oil. Now with a new recording studio he has installed solar panels to power not only the studio but also a wood and metal workshop, and other buildings needed for visiting artists participating in Pulp Arts residency program. Each of these aspects of Hart’s work maintain a strong anti-capitalist response to how the music industry works.

Figure 3-3. Tour bus converted to run on vegetable oil.30

Hart is concerned not only with his environmental responsibility, but also in nurturing the artists on the label and teaching them how not to be exploited as they move their careers into the

30 Photo by Davis Hart, 2017.

larger music industry. “If there’s any underlying mission to what I do, it’s helping artists without exploiting them. We offer whatever artists need,” he says. “It’s a ‘teach a man to fish’ philosophy. Elestial’s here to help teach artists how to survive in the industry.”31 Elestial

Sound’s choice to release their artist’s albums on cassette comes with an array of reasoning, yet the important thing to note is that this is what is happening in this culture with cassettes. Young artists who may not have been born during the peak of the cassette's popularity are reverting back to its tactile, nostalgic form. There is a certain “hip” factor that comes with a niche market, but that is sidelined by the artist’s desire to have a tangible representation of their music in an otherwise digital world. Along with the tangibility of the cassette comes the cultural capital to have had one’s music released (in any physical recorded format). In order for this to occur, there must be a belief that the music is good enough to invest in. Whether self-released or released by a local label such as Elestial Sound, the cassette acts as proof that what the artist has created is worth the investment. Fortunately, with cassettes the investment is less substantial than with vinyl. As discussed later in my interview with local artist Luis Gonzalez, vinyl is expensive to manufacture and can take up to a year to release leaving that money put into the investment floating, whereas with a cassette the turnaround time can be less than a month. Moreover, an artist can duplicate their music themselves on blank tapes at home and make them available on demand for any interested parties. According to Gonzalez, this is an important reason why we still see cassettes available and in use. Many independent record labels have sprung up in the last decade or two simply due to the affordability of the format. One such label is Burger Records that Timothy Taylor highlights in Music and Capitalism. Taylor points out that “if Burger

31 Francischine, “Creative Gainesville,” 2017.

Records thought the music was worthy of release, it ordered 250 to be manufactured. The artist received 50 tapes.”32 The rest were to be sold at shows and shops. If the album did well enough, they would then consider a vinyl release. These types of small-scale labels have perpetuated the use of the cassette format as an economically viable way for emerging musicians to market and distribute their art.

Repurposing

Another area to examine in confronting corporate capitalism is the repurposing of industrial technology. From the corporate perspective in a capitalist society, people are conceptualized primarily as consumers, not as producers. As global corporate activity became more common in the late 20th century, manufacturing factories in America shut down or moved overseas and much of the production was left to small scale crafts people and artists. The cassette is among many other repurposed technologies that intersected with changes brought about through globalization. Many of the blank cassettes now used by independent musicians and fans for recording or creating a mixtape are purchased in secondhand thrift stores. The industrial design of the cassette itself can be modified to allow for erasing and multiple re-recordings.

Commercially released music on cassettes have small slots on the top that prevent someone from recording over the re-recording on the tape. Consumers discovered that these could be covered with Scotch tape and recorded over making finite commercial releases viable for recording again.

In addition, much of the cassette equipment such as recorders and tape players are no longer sold on the shelves at big box stores and are easier to purchase used on eBay or Craigslist. In

Gainesville, a local non-profit organization known as the Repurpose Project offers a large warehouse of used goods including tapes and tape recorders that are available to the public.

32 Taylor, Music, 161.

Figure 3-4. Stack of cassette holders at the Repurpose Project in Gainesville, Florida.33

Here, one can find almost anything from fabric and building supplies to old stereo equipment and cassette tapes. The act of shopping at local based entrepreneurial stores like the Repurpose

Project can also be conceptualized as anti-capitalist: it takes money away from corporations and keeps it in the community. Furthermore, repurposing industrial materials keeps much of our used merchandise from entering landfills.

Having such a place as the Repurpose Project in a local economy also offers a place for small scale producers to find materials to create art or remodel a kitchen. As Jacqueline Saguin stated in a local Gainesville publication, “With its environmental mindset, outreach and encouragement of imagination, The Repurpose Project transcends the norms of a traditional second-hand store.”34 The concept of secondhand use of materials already produced and discarded is a key component of the local cassette culture in Gainesville and helps not only the community, but also the environment.

33 Photo by author, June 2019.

34 Jacqueline Saguin, “The Repurpose Project,” Home: Living In Greater Gainesville, August/ September, 2018. https://homemagazinegainesville.com/the-repurpose-project/

The reuse of materials, especially plastics, is a helpful hand in combating climate change and sustaining healthy marine ecosystem. Cassettes are made of plastic. Plastic waste in the oceans is an enormous problem. A 2015 study by the Jambeck Research Group explores the amount of plastic going into the ocean and states “We estimate that people added 8 million metric tons – and a metric ton is 1000 kilograms, so that’s 8.8 million American tons – of plastic to the ocean in 2010.”35

Figure 3-5. Repurpose Project sign.36

Recently, a team of researchers from six countries calculated that an astounding 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 269,000 tons can be found floating in the global ocean. Most of the

5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are small, between just 1mm and 4.75mm in size. While reusing cassettes does little to combat the bigger problem and many inside cassette culture are not expressly using cassettes to help keep the number of metric tons entering the oceans down, in a microcosm, it is helping to a small degree. This activity intersects with the new subdiscipline in

35 Jenna R. Jambeck, Andrady, A., Geyer, R., Narayan, R., Perryman, M., Siegler, T., Wilcox, C., Lavender Law, K., “Plastic Waste Inputs from Land into the Ocean,” Science, 347, 2015.

36 Photo by author, October 2019.

ethnomusicology known as “ecomusicology.” Perhaps the more important consideration is that artists are using this symbolically to oppose the larger environmental issues in solidarity with environmentally responsible causes. The arts and more specifically, music, is a highly public way to make an anti-corporate, environmentally responsible statement. Examples of U.S. popular music artists using their public platform can be seen in Neil Young’s songs like “Be the Rain” from 2003’s Greendale album where he states, “we gotta save Mother Earth.”37 This sentiment is something he’s been saying most of his career. In Young’s tune “After the Goldrush” from the album by the same name released in 1970 he declared “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.”38 Young has taken it further than most going so far as to release an album titled The Monsanto Years where he takes on the agricultural conglomerate Monsanto that has patented pesticides (poison) in their seeds.39 With Young’s level of popularity, his anti-corporate environmentally responsible statement reaches a large audience.

As defined by Aaron Allen, ecomusicology is “the critical study of music and environment.”40 Allen has also called the study “ecocritical musicology.” In further investigation

Allen goes on to say, “we must resist unnecessary dichotomies between nature and culture, between environments and humans, and we must necessarily fuse these concepts. Music can help us do that.”41 I agree but add that it is not only music as a general concept that helps us fuse the concepts of ecomusicology, but also the process of creating and performing music through

37 Neil Young and Crazy Horse, “Be the Rain,” Greendale, Reprise Records, 48699-2, 2003.

38 Neil Young, “After the Goldrush,” After the Goldrush, Reprise Records, RS 6383, 1970.

39 Neil Young and Promise of the Real, The Monsanto Years, Reprise Records, 550586-2, 2015.

40 Aaron S. Allen, Jeff Todd Titon, and Denise Von Glahn, “Sustainability and Sound: Ecomusicology Inside and Outside the Academy,” Music & Politics 8, no. 2, Summer 2014, 5.

41 Allen, “Sustainability,” 5.

recording with used and repurposed technologies from secondhand marketplaces. If we consider musicology to be the study of music as compared to the performance or creation of music, the term ecomusicology may then be pinpointed as the environmentally friendly study of music or the study of environmentally friendly music. Aaron Allen thinks of it this way, “Ecomusicology can bridge the arts and sciences and can teach creative critical thinking, for we need to remember that the environmental crisis is not just a crisis of science (failed engineering) but also a crisis of culture (failed thinking), so we need to muster all possible humanistic and scientific resources in order to imagine, understand, and confront it.”42 Environmental confrontation, understanding and imagination are all aspects in resisting the overproduction of superfluous commodities for economic gain by major corporations that are unregulated and uninterested in stewardship to the environment.

As we will see, the emerging subdiscipline of ecomusicology carries more than one definition and may be used in many forms. I expand the definition to encompass and specify the creation and dissemination of music as it pertains to the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic and cultural. As Allen, has referred to it, “Rather than a more rigid discipline, ecomusicology is a field, a place where many disciplines meet, much like environmental studies and much like sustainability, only here with an added interest in music and sound.”43 To this, I would add technology, specifically older technologies upcycled like the cassette.

42 Allen, “Sustainability,” 7.

43 Allen, “Sustainability,” 6.

This brings us to the concepts of applied ethnomusicology as activism. As attempts are made to harness the power of music for the greater good, music has the ability to persuade popular thought. Alan Merriam discusses this in his book The Anthropology of Music in relation to the uses and functions of music.44 There are many uses and functions of music whether for religious, patriotic or environmental messaging. For our purposes here, I highlight the function of music for bringing awareness and motivating paradigm shifts. David McAllister puts the ethnomusicologist in the role of understanding music’s function “as an aid in inducing attitude.

We have songs that evoke moods of tranquility, nostalgia, sentiment, group rapport, religious feeling, party solidarity, and patriotism to name a few.”45 In a talk held at College of Charleston

Mark Pedelty asks the related question, “Does music matter beyond aesthetics?” and “can music assist stewardship?”46 He answers affirmatively and goes on to discuss the power of persuasion that music possesses. The power of persuasion and “induction of attitude” is the power to shift paradigms and public policy.

In Jeff Todd Titon’s important journal article “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological

Viewpoint,” he discusses “proclamation” as the highbrow cultural tradition bearers call to sustain a specific music.47 In turn, the high cultural authority serves as the savior or sustainer of culture.

Contrary to this, Titon endorses another path and promotes a re-positioning of “cultural workers

44 Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 1964, 209.

45 David P. McAllister, “The Role of Music in Western Apache Culture,” In Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Anthony F.C. Wallace (Ed), 1960, 469.

46 Mark Pedelty, “Greenbag Lunch Series: Ecomusicology,” Sustainable College of Charleston Video, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72oK3H8zEJo

47 Jeff Todd Titon, “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint.” The World of Music 51, no. 1. 2009, 119- 37.

collaboratively,” a movement that emerges from within the community versus one that is imposed from the top.48 This thesis takes an in depth look at just that, a culture created by a group of musicians and artists working from within a culture to forge a culturally sustainable future for themselves and others. The following excerpt from the conclusion of Titon’s article details the emphasis of cultural sustainability.

The four principles of conservation ecology point culture workers towards fewer top-down, heritage organization proclamations of masterpieces and more partnerships among community scholars, practitioners, and culture workers; fewer preservation sanctuaries where music and other forms of expressive culture, mediated for tourists, become a commercial product, and more bottom-up, community-based efforts to promote participatory music-making in local venues.49

Gainesville’s Elestial Sound and Pulp Arts represent the kind of bottom up effort identified by Titon. Gainesville artists like Davis Hart have found ways to offset their carbon footprint of manufacturing cassettes and vinyl by using solar panels installed on the rooftop of their recording studio. The panels generate 58 kilowatts of energy. Essentially, Hart asked the installers, Pure Energy Solar to estimate the amount of power that would be used on a given day and make it neutral. By doing this, the only energy that they will be consuming will be energy they produce themselves. So, no coal burning energy or hydroelectric energy will be needed.

This captured energy is used to power not only the studio, but also all the buildings on the property; the warehouse adjacent to the studio that houses a metal shop, wood shop and ceramic studio used for the creation of stage design, art installations and tour bus maintenance and the artists residency program that can only be described as a mini city of storage containers. These shops are where Pulp Arts fabricates installation art and stage designs for music festivals such as

48 Titon, “Music,” 2009, 119-37.

49 Titon, “Music,” 2009, 119-37.

FORM Arcosanti, One Spark Music Festival, Suwannee Hullaween, Art Basel and other local and national concert events. It also houses the converted vegetable oil tour buses that undergo routine maintenance in this location.

Initially, Pulp Arts ran into some hurdles when attempting to put both the studio and the workshops on the same electric panel. Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU), in fear Pulp Arts would generate more power than they needed and would sell additional power undermining

GRU’s revenue stream, made Pulp Arts jumps through many hoops of bureaucracy to achieve their goal. It is an interesting debate when we think of how a renewable resource such as sun power can be controlled by large municipal body. GRU is a multi-service utility owned by the

City of Gainesville. They are the fifth largest municipal electric utility in Florida. On the GRU website are found statements in support of solar energy and programs providing credits for residential and commercial buildings that generate more energy with solar panels than they use in a year. However, when we take a closer look at Section 8 SOLAR ELECTRIC

PHOTOVOLTAIC (PV) NET ENERGY METERING (NEM) of GRU’s Energy Delivery

Service Guide, it becomes apparent that taking advantage of the solar program is complicated and strictly controlled. Item 4(c) states, “If review of the PV (Photovoltaic) installation determines that GRU’s distribution system will be adversely impacted the approval of the project will be denied unless acceptable mitigation solutions are possible as determined by GRU.”50

Mitigation solutions were needed in the case of Elestial Sound’s recording studio specifically related to connecting all buildings on the property to the same electric meter. The goal was

50 “Energy Delivery Service Guide: Connecting to Gainesville Regional Utilities,” Vol 1, Issue 40, September 4, 2019, 94.

accomplished albeit with a strict contract. The solar panels are one step they are taking to offset their carbon footprint while also resisting an energy corporation.

Figure 3-6. Solar panels at Pulp Arts recording studio.51

This chapter has explored various way in which anti-corporate and environmentally sustainable ideologies are important aspects of cassette culture. The avenues of anti-corporate capitalism that include cassette culture are threefold. First, the cassette democratized the industry offering agency to musician’s striking out on their own to create, record and disseminate their music without the help of a large corporate entity. This act helped a small community of punk rock and noise musicians to get their music into the hands of their fans and develop a secondary market that they controlled. Piracy led to many consumers recording pre-recorded commercial music from the radio skirting around the industry with the technology of blank tapes and cassette recorders. Piracy came with contradictions as artists that made their livelihood from the music they recorded were punished alongside the corporations. Lastly, the repurposing of cassettes as a resistance to corporate capitalism refocused through an environmental lens has been a part of the

51 Photo by author, August 2019.

growing secondhand store industry rebirthing old technologies up cycling them back into the marketplace.

CHAPTER 4 MIXTAPE CULTURE

This chapter explores the mixtape subculture within the larger cassette culture. Since the

2000s, music consumers have become accustomed to creating digital playlists with iTunes or

Spotify. Mixtapes predated these technologies by more than two decades. In fact, if it were not for the democratizing impact of self-curated mixtapes, the concept of a digital playlist may have not been accepted by the industry and by consumers. One reason for the industry resistance was that the act of individuals copying copyrighted songs from the radio or from a previously purchased LP was in direct conflict with the industry’s goal for its consumers — to buy more of their stuff. However, when it became clear that the music industry could also create revenue streams through services such as Spotify, they grudgingly changed their business model. In light of this industry response, the revival of the older practices of making mixtapes cassette can itself be seen as subversive, anti-corporate activity. In this chapter I will share my experiences of joining a mixtape community in Gainesville and the experience of creating my own mixtape as well as explore the community development I witnessed.

The use of mixtapes features two types of engagement: individual and social. Examining each sheds light on the phenomena of mixtapes that is a cornerstone of cassette culture. The social engagement that occurs in creating mixtapes for others and in participating in cassette swapping clubs highlights the importance of the cassette, not only in the creation of both punk rock and hip-hop music but also in the formation of cultural identities. Cassette tapes were and to some extent still are an integral part of the Grateful Dead community. Although, the Grateful

Dead recordings may not be typically understood as mixtapes, there is a close correlation to the social aspects of tape trading. As a band that emerged out of San Francisco during the psychedelic rock era of the late 1960s, the Grateful Dead are known for their live performances

featuring long improvisational jams. Fans of the band, known as Deadheads, used the new portable technology of cassettes and cassette recorders to document these live performances.

What started as one or two fans making tapes for themselves turned into a significant phenomenon of bootlegs cassettes that were shared widely among the Deadheads. The band, having seen the growth of “tapers” realized what they were up against, and instead of trying to police the unauthorized practice of taping their shows, embraced it. They saw fan taping of their shows as a way to capture the magic of their live performances. Subsequently, tape trading became a promotional tool that brought more people to the shows and built a growing community. Due to the nuisance for many audience members, as they were hushed to keep unwanted noise from being recorded, the band went so far as to create an area exclusively for the tapers at their live shows. The roped off section led to a small sea of microphones on booms extending into the sky recording the shows. There was a communal aspect to the Grateful Dead and their fans that developed “an ethos… that if anyone requested a tape, the taper had to make them a copy.”1 The obsession with the tape recordings of the concerts goes beyond the collectability of the tapes, of which many Deadheads boast hundreds of tapes, often multiple versions of the same concert from different tapers who may have had better microphones and equipment or mixed and equalized the sound in such a way that determines its value. Now that the original band is no longer active, among Deadheads cultural capital can be earned through recognizing even a partial version of a song and being able to state the location and date of the show. This social practice of demonstrating one’s knowledge comes with some braggadocio, but also points to the intimacy of the community as well as the obsessiveness in which the fans listen to the tapes.

1 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 232.

The social practices surrounding mixtapes both divide and unify the participants in cassette culture. On the one hand, trading mixtapes is a common way to share one’s favorite music within the community. The genre of hip-hop may not have grown into the powerhouse of the music industry that it is today without the advent of mixtapes to disseminate the music coming out of the urban parks and house parties. Artists recording their own sounds and music used the cassette as an inexpensive medium to record and share. A pioneer on this side is avant- garde artist Hal McGee who follows the Fluxus model in attempting to keep art as close to life as possible. McGee argues that Thurston Moore’s art book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture actually did cassette culture a disservice. When I asked him to explain why during an interview, he told me, “now everybody thinks cassette culture is mixtapes (said with a snarl). No, it was never about mixtapes never about demos.”2 His overriding belief is that cassettes help foster creativity and cannot be understood solely in relation to creating a playlist and certainly not as a method of exploitation to sell goods. Others though, still hold onto to the notion that mixtapes are an important aspect of music culture.

For some, the mixtape is a nostalgic joy ride into their youth. It can take them back to formative years when they were shaping their identities by the music they chose to put on a mixtape. According to one NPR broadcast, “Cheap and convenient, customized mix tapes made the perfect personal gift. We made tapes for friends, lovers — we shared the depths of our souls through the carefully chosen songs. We aggregated our favorite party songs, ballads for suffering through heartbreak and our loudest, angriest punk rock anthems.”3 Most consumers that initially utilized the cassette tape this way later moved on to subsequent industry developments in music

2 Hal McGee (Gainesville musician), in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, January 25, 2019.

3 “The Mix Tape: Art and Artifact,” June 14, 2005, heard on “Talk of the Nation.”

listening technology (e.g. CDs, mp3, etc.) without reflecting on how the cassette helped develop who they have become. They now remember the technology with nostalgic fondness but are just as fond of Spotify and other online streaming services.

Cassette or mixtape swapping is one manner of social engagement in which artists can share their music or participate in a community of like-minded people. For instance, “In 1971,

[R. Stevie] Moore had started his infamous Cassette Club – a network of pen pals to which he would send his music.”4 There is not much research on this topic, but groups of music listeners frequently participate in the dissemination of music in internet groups. One such group is found on the discussion website Reddit and another on the music media marketplace Discogs. People interested in participating are added to a list and then paired up. At this point, personal messages covering interests and addresses are exchanged, a timeline is agreed upon for each person to make a mixtape for the other, and finally ship it. One Reddit group is titled Fall Mixtape Swap &

Exchange, and for the last two years, the groups get together (virtually) each season. They are an international group shipping their tapes between Australia, Europe, Canada, and the United

States. If participants do not wish to ship internationally, they are added to a domestic shipping list. Each group has their own rules for partnering and shipping mixtapes to each other. For the most part, these are casual exchanges. Below are the rules listed from the Discogs Mixtape group website:

 One round of mixtape trading has two parts:

 first there is the call for participants.

 second is the creation of the tape and sending it to the trading partner.

4 Elodie Roy, “Cassette Fever in the Age of Bandcamp,” PopMatters, April 2014. https://www.popmatters.com/180841-cassette-fever-in-the-age-of-bandcamp-2495668918.html

 calling for participants is open for about two weeks to make sure everybody has enough time to find the thread and raise his/her hand.

 when the first part is done the participants will be shuffled and sorted in pairs.

 the list of pairs will be posted in a second thread as kick-off post for the actual trading part.

 within four weeks from then everybody should create a special mixtape for his partner and send it to him by post.

 so it would be a good idea to contact each other and swap addresses and maybe talk about interests (or not).

 also it would be good to notify in that thread about successful trades or try to solve difficulties if people don't respond or haven't got their tape.5

Jonathan Hiam, a New York Public Library Sound Archivist, during his filmed interview in Cassette: A Mixtape Documentary states “if someone makes a mixtape for you, you have to take it seriously.”6 This statement expresses the power of a human connection established through the act of making a mixtape cassette and the need for the recipient to take the act seriously. A person taking the time to make a tape for someone else demonstrates value that cannot be reproduced in the digital era and distinguishes this act from the digital playlists created through a simple click, drag and drop method. Put in another way, taking away the effort takes away the value — the laborious nature of creating a mixtape on a cassette is the statement in itself. Similar to the saying, “it is the thought that counts” when gift-giving, the thought, the process and the time taken is what creates value in the mixtape.

Mixtape culture spread to mainstream audiences in the 1980s. In the book Mix Tape: The

Art of Cassette Culture, the editor, Thurston Moore, from the band Sonic Youth, tells the story of

5 “Mixtape Trading Round 1: Call for Participants,” Discogs Cassette Tape (blog), 2018. https://www.discogs.com/group/thread/747080

6 Cassette: A Mixtape Documentary, directed by Zack Taylor, Gravitas Ventures, 2016.

Village Voice writer, Robert Christgau who made his own mixtapes of “non-LP b-sides” of the

Clash.7 For Moore, this was the time he learned that he could mix and match his favorite songs in one place for an entirely new listening experience. The history intersects with the industry development of cassette recording hardware. By the early 1980s, dual cassette recorders/players had become commonplace in the consumer market and provided the technology to dub or duplicate recorded sound from one cassette tape to another tape easily with one machine. This provided the average listener the ability to record their favorite songs from the radio and then create their own mixtape playlists. These mixtapes were then often given as gifts to friends.

Choosing specific songs for a mixtape to give to someone else could speak volumes. As the practice of individuals making mixtapes and recording music to tape became commonplace, other media, specifically print media took notice.

John Foster, a DJ at the community radio station KAOS in Olympia, Washington started the organization, Lost Music Network. They began publishing the zine (i.e. magazine) Op

Magazine aimed in part at communities of cassette culture. The column titled “Castanets” was a significant contribution from Op to cassette culture and made a point to review cassette releases, many of which were from little known underground artists. Aside from spreading the word about cassette releases, this zine offered contact information for the artists that built a network of cassette enthusiasts “providing a key boost to the small but bustling underground cassette scene in the Eighties.”8 Twenty six issues of Op were published, each coinciding with a letter in the alphabet, so when the “Z” issue was released, it signaled the end of the run. Two publications were spawned from Op: Option, a more commercial venture than Op without the same

7 Thurston Moore, ed., Mixtape: The Art of Cassette Culture (New York: Universe, 2004), 9.

8 Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life (New York: Back Bay Books, 2001), 457.

underground credentials or as much emphasis on cassettes, and Sound Choice, a sporadic release that was initially scheduled to publish on a bi-weekly basis but often missed publication deadlines. These new types of media publications helped foster cassette culture in many local independent underground music scenes.

By contrast, hip-hop culture initially developed from grassroots activities without the intervention of such media publications championing the genre. However, hip-hop’s engagement with the cassette also exploited the concept and medium of the mixtape, where DJs used it as a way to get their name and music into the public realm and bypass the music industry. Recordings were made of live performances that would then be spread throughout the hip-hop community.

Before hip-hop became a mainstream industry genre in the 1980s and before labels specializing in hip-hop such as Sugar Hill Records, Def Jam and Tommy Boy were founded, many emerging hip-hop artists would record their music on a cassette tape recorder and sell it “out of the trunk of their car” meaning on the streets and not in retail shops. Darryl “DMC” McDaniels of Run DMC stated in the Netflix series Hip-hop Evolution, “I was buying those tapes like drugs every week in my high school ninth grade…Terence Washington would come with a suitcase full of tapes…

I got the Cold Crush Brothers, Funky 4 + 1, Fantastic Five, Treacherous Three!”9 The influential and timely nature of cassette technology and the use of mixtapes to build a grassroots following should not be underestimated. Run DMC went on to become one of the most popular rap groups of the 1980s, won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and were eventually inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.10 11 Bobbito Garcia, hip-hop radio host and filmmaker,

9 Hip-Hop Evolution, Season 1, Episode 2, “The Underground to the Mainstream,” Produced by Russell Peters, Scot McFayden, et al, 2016. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80141894?trackId=200257859

10 “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” website, https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/run-dmc

11 Rap is considered a part of hip-hop music. It is a vocal technique where the MC or rapper rhymes or flows to a beat. Flow, lyricism and delivery are crucial elements of rapping.

describes the cultural capital that could be accrued through insider knowledge of specific cassettes in hip-hop culture,

the way you discerned who was really down — and who wasn’t — was by virtue of who knew Flash to The Beat. That was a cassette that had circulated, containing a live performance of Grandmaster Flash with his crew rhyming. That was a marker in history. There were other tapes that I found about later like Cold Crush and Fantastic Romantic 5. They were recording their lives shows, but they weren’t putting out records.12

The informal, grassroots marketplace that formed was largely due to existing copyright laws that prohibited the sales of these mixtapes because they included copyrighted materials sampled into new compositions. DJs were sampling (repurposing) bits and pieces of pre- recorded commercial records to create their new musical content. The most common use of samples occurred in the “break” section of a song where the harmony would drop out leaving only the rhythm or drums. A skilled turntablist would create a continuous loop consisting of drum tracks (breaks) sampled from the pre-recorded commercial LPs to develop a new song.

Garcia notes the importance of the cassette in disseminating this questionable practice: “Hip- hop’s break-oriented DNA also made the transition to proper studio recordings a little bumpy, since industry folks didn’t initially get the idea of ‘making a record of a record,’ so to speak. All that meant the music had to be spread through grassroots means. The only real way to do that at the time was the humble cassette tape.”13

The influence of this era of mixtapes can still be seen today. While artists have moved on to CDs and online streaming services, the underlying process is the same as the one that started with the mixtape cassette. Antoine Hennion discusses hip-hop’s growth from the early days of

12 Bobbito Garcia, “Cassettes Helped Spread Hip-Hop Around The World,” Discogs Cassette Week (blog), 2018. https://blog.discogs.com/en/hip-hop-cassette-tapes/

13 Garcia, “Cassettes,” 2018.

the informal economy of mixtapes to the industry’s mainstream acceptance of the genre, “before it became just another musical genre and social style—racking up huge sales for the record industry—rap had produced, besides a blow to rock grandeur, a new and lasting instrumental use of ‘reproduction’ technology.”14 With the legality of sampling in question, the alternative of mixtapes was the only way for DJs to share their music.

Now that most computers and cellular phones come with recording software, the use of cassette recording is often considered anachronistic. Though previous to digital recording, cassette tapes were the primary means to recording at home. Many artists used home recording demo tapes to send to record labels in hopes of getting a record deal while others followed the do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk rock and made their recordings from start to finish at home.

Daniel Johnston is a notable proponent of this method. According to his website, “the bulk of his considerable acclaim snowballed from a series of homemade, lo-fi cassettes which Daniel started recording and handing out to fans and friends alike in the early 80s.”15

Mixtape Meetup - Gainesville, Florida

A small niche group along with some local avant-garde artists who use the cassette to record their own music and sounds have a monthly “Mixtape Meetup” in Gainesville. These

Mixtape Meetups are small gatherings of about fifteen to twenty people aged 25- 40 and consisting of an equal amount of men and women. The premise of the meet up is for each member of the group to make a mixtape for an assigned attendee. The parameters of the creation

14 Antoine Hennion, “Music and Mediation Toward a New Sociology of Music,” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. edited by Martin Clayton (New York: Routledge, 2012), 257.

15 “An American Singer, Songwriter, Musician, and Artist.” Daniel Johnston website, https://www.hihowareyou.com/about

of the tape is open ended, either to curate it specifically for the person (if you knew them prior) or simply to include music you enjoy and wish to introduce to someone else.

Ilizibith Miller, the founder and organizer of the group, grew up around music. When she was six, she got her first boombox and her father gave her blank tapes for a small tape recorder she had. She quickly realized the joy of recording a favorite song off the radio to be able to hear it whenever she liked. As she states, “I used to make mixes of my favorite songs when they played on the radio, so that I could hear them whenever I wanted. Again, music was not readily available on the internet like it is today, so being able to hear your favorite songs whenever you wanted was a game changer, especially for a six-year-old who couldn't afford expensive physical media from the record store.”16 She later went on to work at two record stores, Arrow's Aim in

Gainesville, FL and Criminal Records in Atlanta. When I asked Miller what motivates her to organize the meet ups, she told me, “when I first moved back to Gainesville years ago, a friend of mine would host a mixtape meet-up. It was a great way to discover music and existed outside of the algorithms of music applications. These were real people, compiling songs that they personally enjoyed, just to share with you. Those songs were special.”17 This belief that our musical experience is slowly being overtaken by algorithms is a common concern amongst these cohorts. Streaming services such as Spotify or Pandora essentially run an algorithm similar to

Amazon’s recommendation algorithm which as we grow more accustomed to seems to be fading into our unconscious. That same argument is why many in cassette culture put a high value on human interaction and the sharing of musical experiences. She too, similar to Hal McGee is not a

16 Ilizibeth Miller (Mixtape Meetup organizer), in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, May 4, 2019.

17 Miller, in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, May 4, 2019.

purist when it comes to analog audio. She readily admits to creating her playlists on her computer before transferring them to a mixtape.

There is no financial structure in place with this group. No one participates for money, nor do they attempt any sale of music. The gatherings are strictly social. The building of such communities involves an egalitarian ethos nested within to anti-corporate and anti-capitalist stances. The only social hierarchy I have witnessed thus far is in relation to the role of the organizer, though Miller is not a leader and only has the organizational role because she wants to participate. The members of the group do not see themselves as participating in a capitalistic structure while attending the meet ups. The time together listening to the tapes is a breath of fresh air from their daily lives within the capitalist structure of an American life.

At one event I attended on March 22, 2019, which took place in a storage unit turned art studio/ band rehearsal/event space in the North East quadrant of Gainesville, drinks were served, the 1974 John Waters’ film “Female Trouble” was screened silently while the A side of each mixtape was played over a PA system. At this particular event, the music was loud, streaming out into the parking lot where much of the conversation took place. Most of my conversations were centered around cassettes and the culture surrounding the medium, while others were simply social or discussions of art and music.

Miller mentioned this was the second Mixtape Meetup event held and from its first gathering it had grown from ten to twenty-six participants. She anticipates more for the next event. The meet ups are held once a month, giving the participants enough time to create a new mixtape for the subsequent gatherings. Some participants come from outside of Gainesville, mailing in their mixtape or driving into Gainesville to attend the meet up and hand deliver their tape.

Figure 4-1. Collection of some of the one-of-a-kind mixtapes from the second Mixtape Meetup in Gainesville, FL.18

Groups like the Gainesville based Mixed-Tape Meetup, are similar to what Timothy

Cooley describes as affinity groups, which include three key characteristics.19 The first is that the group’s cultural practices serve to draw the group together. In cassette culture, this involves the cultural practice of recording their own music on cassettes or creating mixtapes to share. Desire is the second characteristic identified by Cooley. Considering the fact that most cassette users are not drawn to the cassette as a means for financial gain, the desire is to be a part of a group or to record music without the economic restrictions of a major recording label. This is how cassette users exemplify the desire characteristic of the affinity group. Lastly, and seemingly connected to the second characteristic is the fact that the practice is, to quote Cooley “voluntary and often temporary.”20 Contemporarily, there are many inexpensive, easy to use digital formats to record music with, yet those in cassette culture volunteer to continue using the cassette medium. The reasons for this vary from nostalgia to a hipness factor to the experiential use of the medium.

18 Photo by author, March 22, 2019.

19 Cooley, Surfing, 9.

20 Cooley, Surfing, 9.

As Alan Merriam advocated for understanding music as culture rather than music in culture, to continue my research with this group I decided to take an emic approach and become a part of the culture. My early speculation in taking this approach was quickly quelled while researching at a Meetup. Everyone was very inviting and the overall energy was very inclusive. I spoke of my research openly. Most people were excited to share their stories and even more so to read this thesis. Now as a member of the group, I have been asked to make my own mixtape for the third Mixtape Meetup and bring it to the gathering and swap with someone. Being new to the group, I do not know the person I am making this tape for beyond the fact that his name is James.

The way the group organizes is through Instagram. Miller connects with the members through the social media platform with updates to the date and place we’ll meet. She also chooses the person each member will be swapping with.

In my youth, I made countless mixtapes for all sorts of reasons, but it had been decades since I last made one. As a new member of Gainesville’s Mixtape Meetup group, I was tasked to make a mixtape for the first time in twenty years. I sourced a JVC dual cassette deck from a local

Salvation Army for $4.99. I hooked it up to my home stereo and turntable through the headphone jack (out) into the RCA jack (in) on the cassette deck. I dug into my closet where I store much of my musical equipment to find a collection of blank cassettes. I have been collecting blank cassettes of all types (metal, high bias, normal bias, looping tapes) for different purposes. As they become harder to find, I value them more. For this project, I used a normal bias 90-minute tape.

I then curated the tape with music from my personal record collection. It proved to be a great way to dig into some records I have not listened to in a while. Originally, while developing my theme I thought I would make side A’s theme African Psych/Funk with a focus on Zamrock

(a mix of traditional African music with psychedelic rock in 1970s Zambia). After one song I aborted this theme. The reason is that I don’t know the person, their interests or the depth of their musical knowledge that I am making this tape for so instead of theming it around one style of music, I decided to use it to introduce myself to this person. I was conscious of what each song and the order in which I sequence the mix are saying about myself. Am I a diverse listener? Am I educated? What styles of music am I interested in sharing? Aware that side A will be played at the next group gathering I was able to craft a narration as my introduction to the group.

Having gotten to side B, I started pulling from more sources, not just my record collection. Admittedly, my record collection is slightly limited with half of my records in boxes stored in a closet. I used some commercial released cassettes as well as my own songs stored on my iPhone. Although recording on a dual cassette deck, I was unable to get playback from the second deck. These older machines are often on the fritz. To record from a cassette to a cassette,

I needed to play the original from my Walkman. In doing so, I used an adaptor that after going through the process in real time dubbing the song, I noticed only sent a mono signal to the second machine, panning the one signal hard left. While going through my iPhone the signal was so strong, I had to adjust the gain structure to level out the signal and match the original signal coming from my turntable. All of these variables have made this process painstaking, but the payoff is twofold. One, I get to think about the technological aspect of signal processing.

Secondly, I have had to hunt down material I have stored in a multitude of locations and rediscover music I have not listened to in a long time.

For the cover of the mixtape, I glued together a collage of images from magazines I acquired on a recent trip to Spain. Menos” Funcional, is the title (punctuation included). The title was chosen randomly to allow interpretation. The two words were the first I saw on separate

pages. My own interpretation is that the art is without function, a contradictory definition not devoid of meaning, though not deliberate and without forethought to practice the art of

Csikszentmihalyi's “flow.” The predominant image is of a young shirtless boy in a diaper holding a liter bottle of Mountain Dew. I’ve covered the boy’s face with a caricature of a

Kraftwerk member from their Man Machine Music album cover. Cover art holds a place in cassette culture. The covers of cassettes are known as J-cards due to how they fold over the cassette in the shape of a J. Many covers exchanged at the mixtape meets are handmade and one of a kind.

Figure 4-2. Mixtape Cover Art.21

This adds to the collectability of cassettes. It also adds a personal touch and is another format for personal expression.

The process of creating a mixtape holds value in many arenas from the joy of rediscovering music to a better understanding of identity forged by the music chosen to the exercising of the left brain while creating the artwork for the cover to the participation in a new

21 Photo by Ilizabeth Miller, April 2019.

community. Part self-revelatory and part community building, creating a mixtape for this group proves an important aspect to the value of the process.

Cassette as Musical Instrument

Another form of engagement is the use of the cassette as a musical instrument. In an interview Luis Gonzalez shared his process. He has two dual tape decks, a four-track recorder, a

Walkman and a mixing board to manipulate recorded sounds on each cassette. At various times, he will have all tapes playing at once, though often, he will only be playing one or two tapes at a time and even recording sounds live to then be played back. One live performance I experienced in a dark warehouse storage facility included Gonzalez and his partner/ bandmate beating on a metal sculpture to create ambient sound that was then recorded and manipulated, a piano sample he had previously recorded along with other tapes of sounds put to looping cassettes. Each of these components were mashed up into a sonic landscape that he controlled with a mixing board bringing sounds in and out as he determined. Below is a short transcription of our interview.

Rick Tyner: So essentially, you have four sounds all happening at once in this performance that you can play with?

Luis Gonzalez: Yea and mix or add and manipulate. So last night’s [live performance] it started with this sculpture and these springs,22 pretty minimal tones. We practiced [before the show] to get a sense of the kinds of tones we could produce with this and did a minimal, creepy intro piece and people didn’t know if it was a sax or the sculpture because it sounded pretty similar and then it went into tapes like that piano loop. And it was more obvious that it was saxophone playing along with prepared tapes. So sometimes I just do tapes, but often… they’re one of the main instruments. Deterritory23 is tapes, drum machine and digital sampling. The tapes are a really big part of the process of how the songs become what they are.

R: And the tapes are made by you ahead of time?

22 Referencing a metal abstract sculpture that has contact microphones attached to certain points.

23 Solo project of Luis Gonzalez.

L: Yea, all my own recordings. Some people don’t do that, some people like to use other people’s sounds but for whatever reason I really enjoy making field recordings, making the sounds myself.24

Although he is not alone, the method of performance art Gonzalez uses is by no means mainstream but rather a clever approach to utilizing cassette technology for a new purpose

(repurposing the technology). In addition to using cassettes themselves as live performance instruments, he also records his music to cassette, creates mixtapes and has official releases with several independent cassette labels (one of which is his own) to give to friends and fans covering the full spectrum of engagement with cassettes.

Figure 4-3. Luis Gonzalez’s Deterritory set up including a four-track recorder, 2 dual cassette decks, mixing board and synthesizer.25

In 2017, the National Audio Company claimed that it manufactured 100,000 cassettes daily and “loads over 44 million feet (8,333 miles) of cassette tape each day.”26 The difference in manufacturing cassettes as opposed to vinyl recordings for a commercial or personal release is

24 Luis Gonzalez (Gainesville musician), in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, October 4, 2018.

25 Photo by author, October 4, 2018.

26 “National Audio is the Largest Manufacturer of Professional Quality Audio Cassettes in the USA,” 2017. https://www.nationalaudiocompany.com/history-national-audio-company/

not only the cost, but also the quantity allowed to be made at one time. In vinyl manufacturing, there are established minimums for how many LPs can be made during a pressing, usually five hundred. The cost goes down when you order higher numbers in the thousands. This makes sense — large vinyl machines need to be calibrated; a metal master plate needs to be made for the wax to be physically pressed up against to form the grooves that a turntable’s needle reads as music. It is not a simple manufacturing process. On the contrary, cassette tape manufacturing has small, if any, minimums, which make it incredibly cost effective to the small-scale artist or record label manufacturing the cassette. As stated by Lisa Foster, “They [cassette practitioners] are steadfast DIY warriors, offering low-risk investment for collecting and discovering new music…”27 The risk of financial loss is very low if the cassette does not sell well. If it does sell out, more can be manufactured with a relatively quick turnaround time as opposed to vinyl LPs, whose current resurgent popularity in the second decade of the twenty first century has pressing plants backed up for months. Adding to the disadvantaged position of lesser-known artists, vinyl pressing plants give privileged treatment to more well-known artists that bring larger accounts, leaving smaller, unknown artists at the back of the line. This point was emphasized to me by

Luis Gonzalez who told me,

I love records but they’re a little bit, I don’t want to use the word elitist, but it costs a lot of money to buy records and even more money to put a record out. It takes like six months or even a year or two to put it out if you have the money because it’s swallowed up by people like Jack White and other people putting records out. This [cassettes] is something you can do at home, I like that.28

27 Lisa Foster, “The Cassette Comeback Isn’t What You Think It Is,” Discogs Cassette Week (blog), 2018. https://blog.discogs.com/en/cassette-comeback-isnt-what-you-think/

28 Gonzalez, in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, October 4, 2018.

Quick turnaround time is indicative of cassette artists who prefer to move from project to project to keep with their flow of creative inspiration.

Nostalgia

Cassettes are loaded with nostalgia. Simon Reynolds argues in his book, Retromania, that nostalgia forms when our culture has ceased to move forward and we look to our past for more

“dynamic times.”29 What his position minimizes is the long tradition of incorporating artistic elements and concepts from the work of earlier artists. Most creative endeavors are derived, at least in part, from a time before themselves. To create something completely new and original, without traces from the past is virtually impossible. For instance, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony may have broken an established mold by using a choir in a symphony but was still influenced by the symphonic form as developed by earlier European composers. Similarly, in the popular arena, Jimi Hendrix may have revolutionized performance techniques in the psychedelic electric guitar world of the 1960s, but he was still playing the twelve-bar blues form in many of his pieces. Such examples demonstrate that creativity does not exist in a historical vacuum. So, what is nostalgia, and why is it often conceptualized as antithetical to creativity?

For starters, nostalgia itself has been used as a marketing strategy to manipulate and sell consumers an array of commercial products and processes including music. Lauren Friedman writes in Forbes magazine, “In an age of impersonal digital media, building social connectedness through nostalgia is an easy way for companies to leverage the optimistic feelings that often accompany walks down memory lane. Associating brand messaging with positive references from the 90s, 80s — and even the 70s — humanizes brands, forging meaningful connections

29 Reynolds, Retromania, xiv.

between the past and present.”30 However, this act of manipulation can also insult the consumer’s intelligence which adds to the distaste towards nostalgia among some. Hal McGee, for instance, thinks of himself as an artist in the present tense and regards nostalgia as a marketing ploy that does a disservice to cassette culture, an underlying theme that emerged throughout my interviews. The artists I worked with expressed the view that nostalgia cheapens what they do. Yet as Friedman states nostalgia marketing works in the millennial marketplace and millennials are the largest generation and therefore the most powerful consumers at the moment. “Brands from all industries are experimenting with nostalgia marketing — tapping into positive cultural memories from previous decades, designed to drive energy to modern campaigns.”31 This can be seen in array of consumer content, whether it be the hit Netflix series

Stranger Things with its retro outfitted set of boomboxes and Dungeons & Dragons or Spotify’s use of the 1984 film The Never Ending Story characters.

On the other hand, Michael Chabon believes, “Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion, so nuanced that its sub-variants have names in other languages—German's sehnsucht, Portuguese's saudade—that are generally held to be untranslatable. The nostalgia that arouses such scorn and contempt in American culture—predicated on some imagined greatness of the past or inability to accept the present… nostalgia … is the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection.”32 Similarly, I argue that the cassette acts as a channel to lost connections as well as memories, which helps explain its association with issues of nostalgia.

30 Lauren Friedman, “Why Nostalgia Marketing Works So Well with Millennials, And How Your Brand Can Benefit,” Forbes.com, 2016.

31 Friedman, Forbes.com, 2016.

32 Michael Chabon. “The True Meaning of Nostalgia,” The New Yorker, March 25, 2017.

What is most important to this understanding among members of cassette culture is the preservation of a human experience. While we certainly do not want to lose crucial artifacts that preserve our history, we need to be careful not to take away our present experiences. This may be where the argument forwarded by Reynolds that devalues nostalgia as killing future creativity by living in the past, creates derivative art, and diverts us from a focus on the present is lacking.

The current state of affairs in cassette culture may inhabit both sides of the nostalgia debate. Lisa Foster, of Guestroom Records in Louisville, Kentucky, examines what has been called a comeback of the cassette tape. She states, “Admittedly, the sales increase seems compelling, and the profit margins can be very good, but volume of cassette sales in relation to

LPs and CDs is low. Real low.”33 She indicates that sales of the cassette in 2018 are under 1% of total album sales, a number that includes LPs and CDs. The sales figures do not reflect the romanticism of nostalgia that exists around cassettes. Contrary to these figures, Pitchfork reports a much more significant rise in cassette tape sales in the United States, “According to Nielsen

Music, cassette album sales are up 23%, with 219,000 tapes sold in 2018 compared to 178,000 in

2017.”34

The cassette reemergence is linked to the parallel resurgence of vinyl. Having previously owned an independent record store, I experienced this situation firsthand. What I noticed was a desire for consumers to have a physical experience with their music; cassettes, vinyl and CDs offer that. The popularity and financial success of Record Store Day,35 which is held once a year

33 Foster, “The Cassette Comeback,” 2018.

34 Noah Yoo, “Cassette Sales Grew 23% in 2018,” Pitchfork.com, January 17, 2019.

35 According to their website, Record Store Day was conceived in 2007 at a gathering of independent record store owners and employees as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1400 independently owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally. The first Record Store Day took place on April 19, 2008.A Record Store Day participating store is defined as a brick and mortar retailer

with limited releases only available at independent music retailers spawned Cassette Store Day.

Originally conceived in the United Kingdom by Steve Rose, Sean Bohrman and Lee Rickard of

Burger Records helped bring it to the United States. Cassette Store Day is an exploitation of nostalgia, but there is genuine interest in the format that such a day celebrates. In its first year,

2013, my own record store, M-Theory Records in San Diego, California, started participating.

We acquired a handful of each of the fifty limited cassette releases, brought in hundreds of used cassettes and held an event that included cassette DJs and live bands who had cassettes available for sale. The day was not nearly as successful as Record Store Day where sales increased 200%, yet it was better than an average day with an increase of 10-20% in sales. Each year thereafter maintained a slow increase until 2015 when sales plateaued and eventually were not significant enough to continue the annual event. Cassette Store Day continues to occur each year, but many of the people I spoke with who own independent music retail stores are doing little to invest in events or the limited releases scheduled. In 2016, Lunchbox Records, an independent record store in Charlotte, North Carolina reported 30 new tapes and 90 used tapes sold and that was considered a success. M-Theory Records on the other hand had only one person ask for a

Cassette Store Day release in 2016. There are certain releases that M-Theory has stated they will carry such as the White Stripes which carries an appeal to a more broad-based customer. One reason for the lack of an audience is that the limited cassettes are often overpriced at $15-30. The suggested retail list price of a common new release on cassette costs around $5-7 and used cassettes normally sell between $.25-$1. A contradiction that exists is in the secondary market of eBay and other online marketplaces where the 2014 releases of both J Dilla’s Donuts and

whose main primary business focuses on full time, stand-alone physical store locations, with a major commitment to music retail, and whose company is independently owned, and not publicly traded. (In other words, we’re dealing with real, live, physical, indie record stores—not online retailers or corporate behemoths).

Madvillain’s Madvillainy originally priced at $19.99 sold on eBay for $50. This is definitely a result of supply and demand while at the same time an exercise of exploitation.

The focus on nostalgia is frequently conceived as a thorn in the side of the resistance against corporate capitalism in cassette culture. The desire to reconnect with our youth can be insatiable, but nostalgia has been exploited by advertisers and marketing firms in order to sell goods. The role that nostalgia plays in cassette culture is thus contradictory. On the one hand it brings people back to the medium and on the other it waters down the tactile use of the cassette by commercializing the product.

The mixtape culture is not what it once was as the music streaming services have made the flow of music consumption more convenient. Yet, there are still people that continue to create mixtapes for community building and nostalgic joy. As I stated, my own experience making a mixtape brought me back to songs I had not listened to in decades that reignited memories. The connections I created with those participating in the tape trading group in

Gainesville through my emic approach have fostered new friendships and a deeper understanding of the local music scene. The engagements, both social and individual, are a valuable aspect to cassette culture.

CHAPTER 5 PROCESS VALUES AND CONCLUSIONS

Although the sound quality of cassettes may be inferior to vinyl LPs and not as pristine as digital square waves, this chapter highlights the value of the cassette as much more than just the relative advancements in sound quality or usability of the medium in relation to other formats.

With so many technological improvements in audio equipment over the last few decades there has been a drive for perfection in how we hear music, yet such perfection is unnatural in our natural analog world. Looking into the natural world as an example, there are no perfect trees or flowers. The imperfect compact cassette’s value can be seen in relation to its impact in the democratization of the music industry and the agency it offers to artists in opposing and pushing back against corporate capitalism. In addition, the cassette has played an important role bringing together communities of like-minded music lovers. Jacque Attali discusses the value of music objects and the process in the following way,

Outside of a ritual context or a spectacle, the music object has no value in itself. It does not acquire one in the process that creates supply, because mass production erases value-creating differences; its logic is egalitarian, spreading anonymity and thus negating meaning. Value may then base itself, partially or totally, on an artificial, unidimensional differentiation.1

What I believe Attali is missing here is that value is not only measured financially and culturally.

There is experiential value that is often overlooked as experience is challenging to measure.

Leonardo da Vinci claimed experiential learning as the greatest source of knowledge.

To me it seems that all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by Experience; that is to say, that do not at the origin, middle, or end, pass through any of the five senses.2

1 Attali, Noise, 106.

2 Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 5.

My research has shown that the experience is why contemporary artists continue to use cassettes when there is an easier digital option. According to Mark Hogan, “Artists choose to put out their music on tapes for reasons both aesthetic and practical. From a practical standpoint, cassettes are arguably the least expensive physical recording format available.”3 Aesthetically, it is a subjective and more complicated cultural matter seeped in nostalgia. While cassettes don’t necessarily reproduce sound more accurately than other recording media, they have a distinct quality that cannot be replicated in the digital realm. The warble of the magnetic tape traversing across the playback head, the inherent hiss in tape playback that noise artists have embraced as a part of the aesthetic of their compositions give the cassette a distinctive quality that some prefer or at the very least, put up with as practical material considerations work simultaneously with the aesthetic ones. In fact, through the recursive social practice of making and listening to music on cassettes, such material anomalies become a part of the aesthetic. Hogan states, “Like records, cassettes offer listeners a tangible experience at a time when our jobs, our social lives, and our popular culture are becoming more and more ephemeral.”4 Along with the intangible effect of our digital world, Elodie Roy points out that “a [digital] file is likely to be erased after a failure of the system, online archives are not exempt from being deleted.”5 I think it is safe to say we have almost all experienced this digital loss. The tangible, physical experience of a cassette could well be a sensory alienation issue. Although, with the internet we have access to endless content and data, we are missing the sense of touch and ownership when it comes to our music listening experience. As we have shifted our value perspective on final products, we are missing the

3 Mark Hogan, “This Is Not A Mixtape,” Pitchfork, February 22, 2010. https://pitchfork.com/features/article/7764- this-is-not-a-mixtape/?page=1

4 Hogan, “This Is Not A Mixtape,” 1.

5 Elodie Roy, “British Independent Record Labels, Memory and Mediation – Situating Music Objects in Physical and Digital Contexts,” PhD Diss., Newcastle University, 2014, 206.

feeling of the process and production of music in our digital listening experiences and furthermore, we are displacing value for the process into the focus of value on commodified musical products. Not one of my interviewees expressed any interest in the financial gains of their art. That is not to say they are not deserving of financial rewards for their efforts, rather they prefer to maintain focus on their artistic processes. Developments that I have found in my fieldwork run counter to the capitalistic structure of creating art for financial gain.

Music streaming has become background music; buttons pushed and songs shuffled are quickly forgotten about, lost in the soundscapes of our day to day. The ephemeral and “user friendly” aspect of music streaming services and online music content also leaves us with little to call our own. A 2016 article in Market Watch by Andrea Coombes states that when a person dies, so does their iTunes library: “The Apple iTunes terms of service agreement generally states that your license is nontransferable and will end automatically if you fail to comply with the terms of the agreement… ‘It’s silent about what happens when someone dies. It just says you can’t transfer it, period.’”6 There is nothing to leave behind; no trace of our cultural self. With material cassettes, LPs, and CDs we have physical objects that serve as a reminder to those we leave behind of who we were. The human quest for immortality makes the cassette a valuable commodity to a degree as cassettes do not last forever.

Cassettes also become a gesture of one’s self reaching for a pure form of expression.

The process is why the cassette is still relevant. It enabled more than a price tag on a music medium and became about what you could do with the medium. I argue that the practicality of the cassette is only partly why cassettes maintains their relevancy in the digital age. In the

6 Andrea Coombes, “Who Will Get Your iTunes When You Die? From iTunes and e-books to Bitcoins, Plan Ahead,” Market Watch, August 17, 2016. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/who-will-get-your-itunes-when-you- die-2016-08-17

introduction of Pierre Schaeffer’s Treatise on Musical Objects, he discusses Karlheinz

Stockhausen’s use of the tape recorder to marry the concréte (or the real) with electronic sounds resulting in two freedoms, “one of procedure and the other of the aesthetic that flows from it.”7

This is the precedent in which I explore the process value of creating art with cassettes in both visual and aural arenas. The cassette and the tape recorder offered many musicians these freedoms of exploration that Schaeffer mentions.

The aesthetic that flows from the procedure also relates to Thomas Turino’s ideas on

“flow state” of some forms of music making or the heightened trance-like state of concentration among performers while in performance. Both offer the sublime to the human experience. They are indefinable, yet we are acutely aware of their presence. This undefined aspect of music making is the greatest resistance to corporate capitalism because it resists commodification.

Freedom to continue exploring generates the untapped diversities of our minds that create musics we are yet to hear. By putting non-monetary value on this freedom, we are resisting the status quo for creative evolution. Further, the freedom can expand beyond the performer. Schaeffer recognizes the difference between an audience listening in a live setting versus that of a non-live setting. A perfect reproduction of a performance is unachievable due to many insinuating circumstances such as “vision and other attendant perceptions.”8 With a more controllable listening experience for the non-live audience, that of the sound system, speaker placement, acoustic setting, etc., the freedom of interpretation is of value. No two listening experiences are the same live or with recorded music. Therefore, one cannot be better than another because they

7 Pierre Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disciplines, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 9.

8 Schaeffer, Treatise, 53.

are incomparable and only available to each individual. Still, people frequently ascribe values to such matters and rank (value) one above the other. Regardless, each hold a value.

Highlighting the level of inclusivity that marks the culture, the aesthetic and nostalgic characteristics of the material and the aspects of lo-fi with an egalitarian ethos where the experience of the performance or recording proves more important and of higher value than a high-quality sound. The cassette also holds an individual value for many with nostalgia and memories of youth as discussed in the mixtape chapter. For some, it is iconic. There are contradictions in the lo-fi aesthetic of the cassette that prove the inclusivity of music and cassette culture. One example in Gainesville is Hannah Nelly. She is a professional audio engineer at

Pulp Arts recording studio, working with state-of-the-art hi-fi equipment. Yet, the bands she plays in release their music on lo-fi cassettes. Nelly grew up in Gainesville but moved to

Oakland, California for an internship at a recording studio and to get her BA in Sound Arts.

Hearing of my research on cassette culture she showed an interest in being interviewed since the bands that she performs in have released their own music on cassette. Oakland has a thriving cassette culture and she is also an avid collector of the cassette format and shows great pride in her collection. There are multiple labels and many bands releasing music on cassettes in

Oakland, including Smiley and Naked Lights, both of which Nelly performs in. When asked why she thought cassettes were such a popular format in Oakland she stated,

anyone can self-release and tons of people do. Which means that music that would probably go otherwise unrecorded, or at least unreleased (or released only places like Bandcamp) are being released in a physical format that people actually buy and then actually listen to. It's so great! I am proud of my vinyl collection; I have tons of records by some of (what I consider) the most talented groups to have ever existed! But my cassette collection is, by far, much cooler. My tape collection consists of limited releases by 'nobody' bands who almost no one has heard outside of that band's musical community. Some of my cassettes are mixtapes made by my favorite DJs in the Bay Area who play in tiny clubs you've never heard of. Some of my cassettes are one off projects made by a couple

friends in a bedroom somewhere in Oakland. Some of my cassettes are by bands who were together for a year, wrote ten songs, and then went their separate ways. My cassettes are gems!9

The expression that her cassette collection is “much cooler” falls into the greater sense of cassettes having a value not measured in money. Though, the “coolness” factor is not a process, the act of collecting is a process that distinguishes a person’s identity. She expressed excitement to be back in Gainesville, and though the music scene it is not comparable to Oakland’s, she sees the potential and enjoys what is going on at the studio. Her experience growing up in the

Gainesville community, leaving and returning is not uncommon. Many people I have spoken with here are transient — such is a university town. From my observations, many people return to Gainesville and this lends to the energy that is found in the music scene.

With the cassette and cassette recorder, at a relatively low cost an artist can put a blank tape into the recorder, press the record button and get lost in the performance without the anxiety of exorbitant professional recording studio costs or pressure from major recording labels expecting a high volume of sales. I argue that the relaxed nature of this process of recording yields valuable results not measured by financial gains, but rather in the expanding of our sonic landscape.

In an interview, Hal McGee told me how he values his art and what it is about the creative process the cassette fosters that is valued over the final product he stated,

Certainly, my use of Cassette technology in the 1980s was an economic choice. Many of us who did cassette back then were relatively poor. We did cassettes because it was what we could afford. That's the simplest way to put it. Producing a record was beyond our means. It took a certain amount of dollars, several hundred to thousands, and you had to have a certain amount made. To make that feasible you had to be able to sell them. And according to my ways of thinking then and now, in order to sell anything you have to convince people that it's worth buying. That often means, but of course not always, compromising your artistic vision. So, the fact that we could produce only cassettes gave us a sense of

9 Hannah Nelly (Pulp Arts audio engineer), in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, August 19, 2019.

freedom. By using the cassette medium we had the choice to make as many or as few copies as we wanted... with the emphasis on “as few.” That means we could try anything! We could do exactly what we wanted without having to worry about selling it to anyone. We could follow our artistic visions and try anything we wanted, no matter how crazy or off-the-wall. In those days I even rejected “indie” (vinyl) record label releases as being “pop” and “commercial.” I was pretty hardcore and militant about it. Even Punk records required an outlay of cash, so Punk records were not therefore as "alternative" as they pretended to be. It's said a lot these days about the “Noise” scene that it's more punk than Punk. I think the same could be said about what we were doing in the Cassette Culture Days of the 80s.10

In this quote, McGee clearly highlights the artistic freedom that came with low financial expectations and exemplifies the distinct anti-corporate ideology among cassette culture. He also shared the contradiction that as punk became more accepted, it became less punk. Rather, the ethos that was the backbone of the punk rock movement was corrupted as the genre of music gained more popularity and financial gain became a motivating factor for people to start punk rock bands.

Too often musicians and artists are focused on a final product, whether that be a performance, a recording, or a painting. With this mindset, artists often can’t wait to finish whatever it is they are working on. Process value, as I am calling it, shifts the center of focus on the “creating” (the strike of a guitar string, the air being blown into a horn, the muscle contracting in the throat to push out a note or the swipe of a paint brush on a canvas) and highlights the creative process. The moments in between where the final product is not in sight, only the actual moments of “creating” have a value that captures the human spirit.

In my experience with recording music, the studio process can often be detrimental to achieving musical flow. Depending on the artist’s level of preparation and the producer's desire, the process of recording can be arduous. With new digital recording technologies, artists are free

10 Hal McGee (Gainesville musician), in discussion with the author, Gainesville, FL, January 25, 2019.

to attempt multiple “takes” of a specific piece of music without the repercussions of rewinding the tape over and over again. Now, a simple command from the computer keyboard erases or replaces the guitar part in a song that once would have taken a much longer time. Multiple takes can mean an exorbitant number of attempts to the point of stripping the flow from the music. In both single stereo track and four-track cassette recording sessions, the process is such that certain idiosyncrasies or human errors are often allowed to remain in the track when faced with the challenging process of analog editing (rewinding and syncing up for corrections). I argue that these idiosyncrasies are actually part of the appeal and the magic that convey a human element to the recording and is relatable to the audience regardless whether the audience is aware that it may be a mistake in performance. The concept I am driving at here is best described through

Allen Ginsberg's and Jack Kerouac’s take on Buddhist thinking within their own writing styles

— first thought, best thought. Kerouac described his writing as spontaneous prose or a stream of consciousness. For his book, On the Road, he purportedly loaded a large single role of paper into his typewriter so that he would not need to interrupt his flow of writing to change out the paper every eleven inches.11

For my research, I convinced my bandmates to record some songs using a four-track cassette recorder. In the 1990s, the four-track recorder (pictured earlier) was my primary means of recording. Not only was it my introduction into studio arts, it was a tool to hone my craft as a musician. Now, after many years of recording with digital technologies, I wanted to experience the feeling of recording to cassette again. What I found was exactly as I explained above. As a band of drums, bass, guitar and vocals, we were a well-rehearsed band and played the songs live while recording our performance to tape. The bass ran direct through a pedal sized pre-amp

11 Luc Sante, “‘On the Road’: The Unadulterated Jack Kerouac,” The New York Times, August 17, 2007.

while the guitar and drums were recorded using microphones. We purposely only allowed ourselves three attempts (takes) at each song, which we played from start to finish in case one of us was unhappy with our performance. After we completed each song we listened back for the

“magic.” We ran into common troubles such as microphone placement for the drums. There were no isolation booths, so all the sounds from the room bled into the microphones. The built-in compression of the recorder ended up making the drums sound much softer than expected. The hiss of the tape was expected and appreciated. All of these issues became part of the aesthetic experience. We appreciate the utilitarian, “work with what you got” approach to recorded music.

The limitations help sculpt the sounds you are able to build, therefore becoming an important part of the equation. As most in current cassette culture, we are not purists. We took each of the four tracks and digitized them in order to add more vocals and guitars and create a mix that we then sent off for mastering. Members of the band discussed releasing the final product on cassette as well as in digital formats. When I think about the songs as finished products, they are not of much value. Yet, when I think about the process of creating and recording them, I get a much higher sense of pride, which I value greatly. The reward for creating this recording is not financial. The time spent making the recording is the reward and the time has passed so although the reward was received, it has also been taken away and is no more than a memory of an experience.

The band also had the opportunity to record in the new recording studio in Gainesville that grew out of the Elestial Sound artist cooperative called Pulp Arts. The recording studio has a mix of the new and the old in terms of technology. The studio is loaded with vintage amplifiers and microphones alongside brand new top of the line gear. A Steinway grand piano sits in studio

A as well as an old tape-recording machine in the studio A control room. The marriage of old

and new technologies offers everyone recording there a chance to learn and try new things. Our recording process was incredibly different from our time in the warehouse with the four-track recorder. For starters, we were recording digitally. Since our experience with the four-track recording was successful, we attempted to translate that feel to this new professional experience by only allowing three takes on each song. For the majority of the songs, we only needed two takes.

Again, as I have attempted to prove throughout this chapter, it was the process that mattered to us. A multitude of reasons go into our determination of value. First, finding the flow and capturing the magic was our primary goal. The sound aesthetics of the tape was a key element to our process. Also, the fact that the performance and process were not commodified gave us the sense of being in solidarity of the resistance against the major music industry. We were not in it for the money, so to speak.

Technology will continue to evolve and as it does artists will find ways to utilize it outside of its specific functions. This essay looked at how the cassette was developed for commercial use only to be used against commerciality and commodification in artistic ways. The torch has been passed to the internet and file sharing which function similarly but on a much larger scale. Yet, the cassette was the first widely received technology that broke the rules of engagement and ushered in new styles of music along with it. It is now a tool in a toolbox of technologies for artists.

There is an interesting dichotomy to recording and performing. In recording, a replication of a performance is created regardless of how well it captures the performance. The replication becomes the product, yet the process is the performance that is replicated. The product cannot exist without the process. As American society grows further away from being a producing

country and becomes more of a consumer country, we are cutting out the essence of what we are attempting to consume. The producing and the process are the heart and soul of the product.

Without them, the product only has a dollar value. Attali wrote, “The love of music, a desire increasingly trapped in the consumption of music for listening, cannot find in performance what the phonograph record provides: the possibility of saving, of stockpiling at home, and destroying at pleasure.”12 While this may be true in some cases, I’ve found the love of music not to be trapped, for in the process of creating music it is set free — a freedom that exists for the human spirit that sets out to explore and create.

The audio cassette was a spark to light a fire of anti-corporate capitalism. Although, it was not invented for such a cause, its mere existence and the ways in which artists chose to utilize its capabilities made it a strong yet unassuming technology to infiltrate a counterculture with the ideas of democracy and resistance to capitalistic structures. As Staub put it, “the audio cassette was a revolutionary technology that allowed for an unprecedented amount of creative and economic control over the production and distribution of musical recordings.”13 Intentionally or unintentionally, the revolutionary aspects of the cassette acted as a tool of resistance against corporate capitalism. Environmentally speaking, the repurposing of the cassette to re-record or to use as an instrument has also offered an arm of resistance to the anti-capitalist art movement.

In Gainesville, Florida, a small but thriving cassette culture continues to exist in multiple ways including avant-garde artists using cassettes as instruments or bringing people together to participate in a subcultural community of mixtape music enthusiasts. In the “Think Global, Act

Local” environmental campaign parallels can be drawn to a wider community subverting

12 Attali, Noise, 84.

13 Staub, “Redubbing,” 85.

corporate corruption on a broad scale. I have only scratched the surface, but I have found promising leads for further investigation. I have attempted to point out cassette cultures subversive lineage of art and music movements throughout history that have pushed up against the status quo and the corruption found in capitalistic societies: some by mere coincidence, others overtly so. The democratizing power the cassette had, in giving agency to artists that would have otherwise been without, shows how a small cartridge filled with magnetic tape could have a profound effect on a culture.

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Discography

Bow Wow Wow. “C30, C60, C90 Go.” Original Recordings. EMI Records, 1A 064-64 890. 1982. LP.

Lennon, John. Double Fantasy. Geffen Records, GHS 2001. 1980. LP.

McGee, Hal. Home for the Hellidays: Audio Folk Art Dictaphone Assemblage. Self-released. 2018. CD.

Minutemen. Double Nickel on the Dime. SST Records, SST 028. 1984. LP.

Pearl & the Oysters. w/ Pearl & the Oysters. Elestial Sound, ES 025. 2017. Cassette.

Young, Neil. After the Goldrush. Reprise Records, RS 6383. 1970. LP.

Young, Neil and Crazy Horse. Greendale. Reprise Records, 48533-2. 2003. CD.

Young, Neil and Promise of The Real. The Monsanto Years. Reprise Records, 549799-1. 2015. LP.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Richard Tyner graduated with a Master of Music from the University of Florida in 2019.

His concentration was in Ethnomusicology. Mr. Tyner studied guitar performance at the Berklee

College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. He completed his Bachelor of Arts in Music in 2004 at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. After completing his undergraduate studies, he did ethnographic fieldwork in Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. While in

Australia, he received his Graduate Certificate from the Queensland University of Technology with a focus in music production. He has had his own record label, record store and has worked as a touring musician.