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Livros sobre música que vale a pena ler - Cromo #105: Marc Masters - "High Bias - The Distorted History Of The Cassette Tape"


 

autor: Marc Masters
título: High Bias - The Distorted History Of The Cassette Tape
editora: UNC Press
nº de páginas: 214
isbn: 978-1-4696-7598-5
data: 2023
1ª Edição




CAPA:

HIGH BIAS

Marc Masters

The Distorted History Of The Cassette Tape

UNC PRESS

 

CONTRACAPA:

MUSIC

“Tapeheads rejoice! Marc Masters has crafted a joyous but detailed history of the cassette, as quirky and personal as the mixtapes you used to make!2

- PATTON OSWALT, comedian and actor

 

“In this deliciously deep dive that spans from the birth of hip-hop do Deadhead show tapers to the Japanese underground, Masters reveals why cassettes continue to endure deftly illuminating earlier analog eras and the very digital now.”

- JESSICA HOPPER, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic and Night Moves

 

“Who knew that the oft-disparaged cassette was responsible for literally bringing the world together? Marc Masters knew, and he does an astounding job tying endless threads into a story that is entertaining, surprising, and ultimately inspiring, showing us all how the cassette tape changed the culture time and time again.”

- TOM SCHARPLING, author and host of The Best Show with Tom Scharpling

 

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed the music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don’t like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities.

This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 80s to its Decline at the birth of compact discs to its resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for “killing music,” the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn’t control. For so many, tapes meant freedom – to create, to invent, to connect.

Mar Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today’s labels that reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.

 

MARC MASTERS is a music journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, NPR Music, and Rolling Stone. He is the author of No Wave.

 

NC

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

WWW.UNCPRESS.ORG

 

ISBN 978-1-4696-7598-5

 

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

 

 

© 2023 Marc Masters

All rights reserved

Designed by Lindsay Starr

Set in Miller and Market Pro

By codeMantra

Manufactured in the United States of America

 

Library of Congress Cataloging.in-Publication Data

Names: Masters, Marc, author.

Title: High Bias: the distorted history of the cassette tape / Marc Masters

Description: Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press

[2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index

Identifiers: LCCN 2023008284 | ISBN 9781469675985 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469675992 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Audiocassettes – Social aspects. | Music – History and Criticism

Classification: LCC TK7881.6.M37 2023 |

DDC 621.389/324-dc23/eng/20230302

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023008284

 

Dedicated to the memory of Eric Didul, 1968-1990

 

Índice / Contents

Introduction – 1

Chapter One – Killing Music – The Rise Of The Cassette Tape – 5

Chapter Two – Creating Music – How Cassettes Helped Launch Movements – 33

Chapter Three – Cassettes Underground – An International Network of Tape Artists – 61

Chapter Four – The Tape Traders – Recording And Sharing Live Music On Cassette – 85

Chapter Five – The Tape Hunters – Traveling The Globe To Unearth History On Cassette – 111

Chapter Six – The Tape Makers – The Culture Of Personal Mixtapes – 133

Chapter Seven – Tape’s Not Dead – The Cassette Comeback – 151

Acknowledgemnts – 175

Bibliography – 177

Index – 197

 

INTRODUCTION

Making, listening to, and caring for cassettes is the most hands-on and personal music listening experience. For sure. You don´t just listen; you’re very involved.

- Adam Horovitz, Beastie Boys

 

There are two things I remember well about my initial week of college. First, right after our inaugural dorm meeting in which we were warned about the dangers of alcohol, one of my dormmates started handling out cans of cheap beer. Second, a guy across the hall from me who would become my friend, Glen Springer, asked if I wanted a copy of a mixtape someone back home had given him called Toxic Tunes. I found the latter offer far more exciting.

Toxic Tunes was filled with songs by weird punk bands I had read about in high school but never actually heard. Where I grew up, it took an hour to drive to the closest record store, and that store certainly wouldn’t have sold anything that was on this mixtape. Just the group names and song titles by themselves sounded illicit. Dead Kennedys, the Meatmen, Butthole Surfers. “Too Drunk To Fuck,” “Tooling For Anus,” “Bar-B-Q Pope.”

But then, cassettes had always felt a bit forbidden. When I started listening to music as a kid, buying a vinyl record album was approved, official, what you did if you wanted to hear something. Then I found out about tapes. Could I really copy albums from friends instead? Could I really put different songs from different records onto the same tape? Could I really dub one tape onto another? It all felt so down and dirty, so private yet so cool to share. And once I got to college, sometimes it seemed like making tapes was all I did.

 

Wouldn’t you really rather have a cassette than a record anyway? Cassettes don’t scratch, they fit in your pocket, they’re marvelously portable (home, car, friend’s home, friend’s car), and they stack up nice and neat. They also cost less.

 - R. Stevie Moore, from his R. Stevie Moore

Cassette Club catalog

 

The cassette tape is revolutionary. It’s small, it’s cheap, it’s easy to use. It’s not necessarily more foolproof than a record – in fact you can screw it up even worse, and it can even just screw up on its own. But when a record gets scratched, it sounds annoying. When a tape warbles or flutters or wrinkles, it sounds… kind of cool? It makes you think, what if other music sounded that way? What if my music sounded that way? And you can fix a lot of tape problems yourself without knowing much about what you’re doing. It has screws you can unscrew, spools you can wind with a pencil. You can even fix breaks in the tape – with tape! And you can always buy more blanks if the ones you have fail.

Tapes can go wherever you go. They can get lost at the bottom of your backpack. Huge sprawling piles of them can gather on the floor of your car. They can become orphaned from their cases and replaced by something that then, for some reason, never makes it back to its original home. They can shine from racks on your wall, their thick spines beaming the colors of handwritten titles toward you like light beckoning a moth.

The cassette tape is an audio medium that everyone can access and control and modify and remake and destroy and resurrect. It’s an audio medium that was actually made for everyone. That’s pretty revolutionary.

 

Cassettes are one-to-one. That’s the populist way. “Here’s a tape.” And you could just make the tape. So it was the people’s format.

- Ian MacKaye, Fugazi / Minor Threat / Dischord Records

 

The cassette tape is a way people can talk to one another. Its uses and benefits and anomalies form a language – one that often brings another language with it, music. A mixtape you make for someone can be a code, a message, a signal, a conversation. Music you create and record on cassette can be a missive, a statement, a movement, a plea for attention. What you capture on cassette – concerts, songs from the radio, random noises – can become your hobby, your personality, your reputation. Sounds realign magnetic particles on a tape, and when you associate one sound with another because you put them together on a tape you liste to over and over, the tape realigns your brain.

Cassette tapes are personal, amateur, and subjective. They don’t exist if someone doesn´t hear them, and everyone hears them differently. They are for individual use and collective exchange. They have built communities, connected like-minded people over long distances, and passed along local and regional styles and innovations when no other means or medium would or could. They are do-it-ourselves. One person does something by themselves on tape, and soon enough a bunch of people are doing it by themselves, together.

 

It’s sloppy, it’s dirty, it’s marked the way the human body is marked, by the space and time it passes through. It wears those scars and those scuffs, and that becomes part of why you love the tape.

- Rob Sheffield, from Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape

 

The cassette tape is imperfect. It degrades, it tangles, it adds noise, it adds hiss. It puts a smudgy fingerprint on everything it touches, and everything that touches it does the same. It eventually dies, though it often lasts longer than you expect.

For anyone who loves cassette tapes, its mechanics are magical. The way the case swings on a hinge like a miniature book, so satisfying to open and close. The way the cover, or J-card, folds into halves and thirds, with layers begging to be opened and perused. The way the outer shell protecting the tape is so smooth, molded, symmetrical. The way you can peek into the tiny window and watch the tape work, spooling forward and backward, or just let it still, waiting to be played, holding sound between its layers. The way the cassette tape fits about is perfectly as any object could in the palm of your hand.

 

Tape has its own narrative, its own way of structuring narrative… and this is a narration intimately caught up with human belief in life as an accumulative narrative.

- Paul Hegarty, “The Hallucinatory Life Of Tape”

 

Cassette tapes are analog. They don´t replicate sound exactly as it is. They distort it, and the more you copy them, the more distorted the sounds become. The story of the cassette tape is distorted too. You can sketch out a map of its journey, but the textures, the hills and valleys, depend on which trails you follow. Perhaps that’s true of anything, but it’s especially true of a format so customizable, so intimate and social and surreptitious. The cassette tape has meant so much to so many that its history is as diverse as the innumerable people whose lives it has altered.

What follows is a version of that history, tracing both how the cassette tape emerged – as a technological development, a marketed product, a cultural icon – and how things changed because of the cassette tape. It’s a winding, messy path trough international commerce, far-flung musical movements, covert underground cultures, and most important, intimate connections between people obsessed with their own ways of using and sharing cassette tapes.

In the technical lingo of cassette tapes, “high bias” means high quality. The higher the bias, the better the sound. The story of the cassette tape has bias, too. Every person who encounters a tape adds something to that story, whether by listening to it, recording over it, or passing it on. That’s why this story is still going – because every cassette tape offers a chance to do something new.

 

If a record sucks, it sucks. If a tape sucks, you can put something better on it.

- Mike Haley, Tabs Out cassette podcast





https://blog.superflyrecords.com/storyboard/brian-shimkovitz-on-awesome-tapes-story/




https://awesometapes.com/


https://culturemachine.net/recordings/the-hallucinatory-life-of-tape/




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