The nicest thing anyone has said to me recently is: ‘But surely you’re far too young to remember cassettes?’ Sadly, I had to break it to my new neighbour that, as a child of the 1980s and a 1990s teen, I’m not – which is why I’m bemused to learn that tapes are the latest piece of retro tech to make a comeback.
Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX are among artists who’ve released new music on cassette, fuelled by Gen Z’s apparently insatiable appetite for nostalgia and clunky devices long since sent to landfill.
Sure, I can see the appeal in a format with a bit of soul and a physical presence: I’ve written about buying vinyl for my young sons for The Spectator after realising they didn’t understand the notion of an album, thanks to streaming. And I’m in favour of a device that has a bit of weight and warmth, like the Nokia 3210, and doesn’t, unlike a smartphone, distract you with multiple notifications trying to haul you off elsewhere.
But cassettes? Like heroin chic and slut-shaming interns, they’re best left back in the 1990s. Tapes became obsolete for one reason: they were crap. Inconvenient, muffled, and short-lived. Take the short shelf life. Most of the albums I bought on cassette had to be replaced – there was a finite number of times you could rewind ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on a Sony Walkman on the coach on the school French exchange in 1992 before the tape spooled out and got stuck. If you had the patience to extract the tape with a pencil, then you could wind it back in, which might give you another couple of weeks before it did it again and snapped. I think part of the nostalgia is because cassettes are, and were, a cheap format. But it wasn’t cheap having to buy Nirvana’s Nevermind twice on cassette, then replacing it on CD and now, 30 years later, on the vinyl I should have bought in the first place.
Gen Z get all warm and fuzzy about lo-fi analogue sound quality. If you appreciate background hiss, muffled highs and limited bass, then knock yourself out. All cassettes did was to teach us patience, as we sighed and reached for a Bic Biro with which to wind ‘Ten’ by Pearl Jam back in – and a slightly wonky recollection of track listings. Decades later I still hear certain songs and immediately think, ‘Ah yes, side 1, track 2’ (‘Creep’, on Radiohead’s first album) or ‘side 2, track 2’ (‘Under the Bridge’ on Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers).
Cassettes could also be lethal. My mother was in a near-fatal car crash when her car ploughed through traffic lights into a BMW after her brakes jammed. Amidst the wreckage, the police found the double cassette of Now That’s What I Call Music! (Vol. 10) wedged under the brake pedal (Side 1, track 1: ‘Barcelona’ by Freddie Mercury and Monserrat Caballé).
Gen Z are the ‘digital natives’; they have grown up immersed in it and so, the thinking goes, are highly tech-savvy. But I don’t agree. To be truly tech-savvy, you need to have owned music in 47 now-obsolete formats and have a drawer containing at least three of the following: a Walkman, Discman, MP3 player, Minidisc player, iPod, iPod Nano.
Like heroin chic and slut-shaming interns, cassettes are best left back in the 1990s
It was a more innocent time when, if a boy liked you, he’d spend hours compiling a mix tape to express his feelings – rather than sending an obscene picture on Snapchat. Recently, going through some boxes in the attic, I found a mix tape made for me by my first boyfriend (Pixies, Morphine, Hüsker Dü). I started feeling as fuzzy as the cassette of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd that I carted around India on my gap year, before remembering that I had no means of playing it, also that we parted on such bad terms, I haven’t actually listened to Hüsker Dü since we broke up, in 1998.
Xennials like me could burn CDs — and not in the way that the Third Reich immolated books. We programmed VHS recorders and learned to feel empathy through the one classmate whose parents had invested in Betamax. Taping The Chart Show on a Sunday afternoon gave us lightning reflexes. I tried to explain this once crucial process to my older children, but it became so complicated – involving the concepts of a number one record/single/singles regularly selling more than 500,000 copies – that I gave up. It would have been simpler to explain nuclear fission.
Increasingly, the retro tech trend feels increasingly daft, like hipsters and their fixed-gear bikes and Edward VII beards in the 2000s. Peak hipster, for me, came in 2017, when I observed a Deliveroo rider on a Penny-farthing on the Dulwich Road in Brixton.
Gen Z have done the same with cassettes. Tapes are dumb tech and it’s time to consign them to landfill, or the charity shop, for good.
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