A war of musically historic proportions was recently fought, and undeniably won, on the consumer battlefield. The weapons: compression, kHz, dBs, signal to noise ratios, and quantization. The bloody and unquestionable outcome of this hi-fi versus lo-fi clash was the heartbreaking fall of the cassette tape. By the mid 1990s, the role of the tape in popular culture was unrecognizable compared to the ingenuity, importance and indispensability it represented at one time. Once the pinnacle of musical trendiness and technological advancement, the tape is now doomed to spend the rest of its existence as a 25-cent clearance-bin special and garage sale staple. The beginning of the end came in the late 1970's when, with several other companies including Sony, Phillips, the company which had originally given birth to cassette technology, invented a novel item called a LaserDisc, which would later become the Compact Disc; making a veritable Marcus Brutus out of the Phillips Company, and a woeful Julius Caesar of the once mighty tape. (Note Phillips' clever involvement of other companies so as to avoid being labeled the sole perpetrator in the offing of its industrial offspring) The imperfections of analog recording just could not compete with the flawless precision of digital technology. As a result, the only titles available on cassette today are such platinum selling classics as Billy Graham's Inspirational Messages, and Learn to Speak Swedish in a Fjorton Dagar. Perhaps the only tale more tragic than the demise of the commercially recorded tape is that of the sudden decline of mixtapes in the face of the Internet, file sharing and the iPod.
In 2000, a man by the name of Tony Fadell, an employee of Phillips, conceptualized a portable digital music player thar far exceeded the sound quality and capabilities of the Mp3 players which were currently on the market. Turned down by his own employer, (no doubt due to the still haunting guilt of its deliberate betrayal of the cassette), by 2001, Fadell had pitched his idea to Apple who hired him, gave him an extensive design team and a one year deadline to produce his proposed device. After eight months of intensive discussion, difficulties and development, Apple released the iPod. Now available in Mini, Shuffle, Nano and even U2 forms, the iPod, which allows consumers the freedom of both converting and downloading music to create, essentially, an extensive digital mixtape, has earned Apple 75 per cent of the portable music devices market, factoring into the sale of over 14.8 million iPods last year. This musical innovation is rapidly eroding the final ground the cassette tape has to stand on, namely the mixtape, thereby proving its angelic, encasement a mere disguise for the demon-intent-on-destruction that lurks within.
To try and state all the jargon and scientific reasoning, despite the abundance available, for either side of the digital versus analog debate would be tedious and confusing. No one needs to be convinced that digital recording technically produces a higher quality sound; this is just fact. What needs to be preserved through the mixtape is not sound quality, but tradition and nostalgia. Oscar Wilde once stated that “everything popular is wrong.” This quotation, through its seeming fallibility, is the basis for the need of a mixtape renaissance; namely, a return to care, quality, and community. When one creates and shares a mixtape, it doesn't matter that due to the nature of analog technology any imperfection on the physical tape can be heard in the music or that cassette tapes have a maximum output of 20-25 kHz and 70 dBs, as those things are not really music and the average person has no idea what it all means anyway. The importance of the mixtape, as continually outlined in this three-part article, is the tradition of exchanging ideas, and the things which matter in this art form have nothing to do with fidelity, amplitude or popularity, but rather consideration and effort. And here in lies the suggestion that file sharing and mixCDs just do not possess the same artistic and thoughtful power mixtapes do, and never will. Where's the careful planning around time constraint so as not to cut-off half way between songs but also not leave too much dead air at the end of the tape? Where are the liner notes, cover art and witty titles?
Where's the time and consideration? What of the physical exchange? All of this is missing when you take the tape out of the mixtape, and thusly, when the elements which should be intrinsic in the creation of a mix of music are gone the artful point of it all is dead. The only solution is the Mixtape Revolution. No longer will there be a need to stand silently ashamed of the mixtape and Walkman hidden in your backpack because you are not alone and you are not wrong. Through active participation in mixtape exchange, arms will be taken against a sea of tactlessly contrived music compilations and by opposing, prevail over them. The hissing and clicks, and haphazard construction of the mixtape are inherent and fundamental features of music exchange. The question of whether to hit Stop or Pause when starting the next song is a seriously debatable topic. It is not wrong to long for musical nostalgia! Lo-fi is not a crime! Vive la mixtape!
Support the mixtape renaissance; join the Mixtape Revolution mixtape exchange. cool.tapes.revolution@gmail.com.
