It is strange to learn through the media that specific and intimate aspects of one’s own cultural history are making a “comeback.” Maybe 15 to 20 years ago, a certain American demographic started collecting and playing vinyl records again, for example. Out of nowhere, it became trendy. Today, people of all ages still giddily search for records on Discogs and invest in turntables, after a 20-year respite.

My millennial son and daughter-in-law now maintain a modest record collection. However, they collected these vinyl relics more or less at random, in small batches, in flea markets. They don’t even bother to search for records by artists they like. Their enjoyment of this seemingly kitsch analog activity is almost entirely ironic, like dressing as a steampunk or churning butter.

I understand. Millennials love their irony. But they are entirely divorced from the activities and emotions that once made vinyl collecting and record playing irresistible.

Last month, and in a similar vein, I learned that cassettes were back in fashion after three decades of absence. Technically, I’m not part of this revival. I use two means of playing cassettes, and have for some time, as my collection of mix tapes – dating back to my own golden age of mixtapes (1986-92) – has remained a sweet nostalgia for me. The idea of ​​buying new cassettes, or making them, seems rather anachronistic, because the technical and relational conditions that prevailed during this golden age no longer exist.

In short, you have to be of a certain age – “old as dirt” is the technical term, I think – to remember the cassettes and what made them so special. But that doesn’t mean we should throw their fascinating 20th-century tale into the dustbin of history.

Until the late 1970s, there was no practical way for ordinary people to record music from vinyl records – or from the only other music source then available, radio. Cassettes changed all that. The advance proved to be both technological and cultural: A friend who owned Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky” album, for example, could simply record the whole thing for you. This saved money. Cassettes are also stored more efficiently, in something as small as a shoebox. It is important to note that they could also be played in your car, if it was equipped with a tape recorder. It was huge.

Yet cassettes also turned any asshole into a legit DJ. Throughout the 1970s, radio was the only place where music consumers could listen to a stream of individual cuts from multiple albums, from multiple artists. We take this phenomenon for granted today, thanks to Spotify, iTunes, Pandora and YouTube. However, commercial radio is the origin of this experience – with announcer interruptions. Our record players gave us an ad-free choice, just one immutable album at a time.

Cassettes skillfully merged these multiple forms of musical consumption. They allowed us to create these playlists ourselves, from our own record collections. They allowed playlists using other people’s collections, from songs hijacked from the radio, even from other cassettes (if a stereo had two decks). This versatile capability, acquired during the first Reagan administration, proved to be quite breathtaking and futuristic. Then Sony introduced the Walkman and we all felt like cinematic characters from Blade Runner.

If you were there in 1983, that wonder remains tangible and meaningful to this day – in the form of these mixtapes. If this were not the case, the phenomenon would probably be reduced to a simple anachronism.

Our experience of the moment does not create a simple memory. It gives meaning to things. For example, it took a long time to put together a mixtape. We are talking about days and days. Emotionally, it added even more levels of satisfaction, producing mixtapes for parties, for his own enjoyment, for his vehicle trips. I worked primarily with TDKs from the 90s, which meant that each side of the cassette could hold 45 minutes of music. Naturally, the finished products required clever titles, cover art, and carefully researched song lists.

These were works of art, time-stamped to reflect specific periods of life.

If you were dating someone, well, there were few gestures more meaningful than making a mixtape for them. One had to be careful with such a powerful feeling, however, lest the gesture prove too much, too soon. Plus, it takes a month or two of dating to really understand someone’s musical tastes – at least that’s what I remember. Preemptively hitting a poor woman with a mixtape invariably loaded with a man’s favorite music felt like a dangerous and primordial form of mansplaining.

And yet, it was the nature of this very technical, long and deeply felt effort that gave meaning to the exercise – for someone else, possibly, but for oneself immediately.

Let me give you an overview of the technical side of mixed tape engineering, via a brief introduction to the 540 method. So, you make a mixtape and you stop recording at the end of a single piece of vinyl. Step 1: Press the RECORD and PAUSE buttons on the cassette deck simultaneously. We are now ready to restart recording quickly and accurately. Step 2: Queue the next vinyl track to be recorded using a wet finger on the inside of the disc and a paper label. This way, one can carefully stop the deck at the exact point where the next track begins. Then comes the fun part: manually invert the disc a full turn (360 degrees) on the turntable – plus another half turn (180), making 540 degrees total. Step 3: Hold that finger in place, on the disc label, before lifting said finger at the same time the PAUSE button is pressed. Like magic, the music will start and the tape recorder will start recording, in unison.

This is the perfect transition. Guaranteed.

The 80s cassette itself was a fairly fragile item. It got dirty and gummed up quickly and easily, especially when stuck under passenger seats or behind stereo consoles. Even if carefully stored in sterile, hyperbaric environments, the tape itself can stretch or wrinkle in lower quality tape recorders, leading to distortion of the music output before ultimately breaking. If the mixtape was valued enough, this break meant the delicate deconstruction of the plastic casing of the cassette, the micro-gluing of the tape using very thin strips of surgically applied tape, and the reassembly of the reels in the taught position – using pencils, the angles and diameters of which were perfect for the job.

However, the tape stretched between the two spools was itself made of a polyester-plastic film with a magnetic coating. Unlike what you may have seen Tom Hanks end up in Cast Away, you can’t relate anything to such material. Once repaired, it is even more fragile. According to the tape recorder, simply stopping and starting the repackaged tapes carried great risks.

Part of this technological challenge will survive until 2024, according to the New York Times, which reported in October that the real difficulty these days is finding working tape recorders. The last vehicle to roll off the assembly line with a tape recorder was apparently a 2010 Lexus. Stereo manufacturers abandoned them long before then. Today, saving on such things is a huge demand, much like stocking up on leaded gasoline.

I maintain and preserve my own tape recorder options because I’m aware of these obstacles and, as you may have noticed, I have a hard time throwing things away.

I made my last mixtape for a friend in 1993. It was not received as I hoped, by her, because the cultural moment had already passed. Compact discs had taken over the market and the vinyl/retro movement had yet to develop an iota of traction. I remember being a little surprised by his indifference, but I let it go. She married me anyway.

Hal Phillips of Auburn has been a journalist since 1986 and CEO of Mandarin Media, Inc. since 1997. His first book, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories, and the Creation of Football in Americawas released in 2022. Rowman & Littlefield will release their next effort in 2026. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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