| Cassettes didn't play a role in hip-hop in the early days. Cassettes WERE hip-hop. | | | | |  | Chrome, pre-Google.
(Xray40000/Flickr) | | | | | "Cassettes didn't play a role in hip-hop in the early days. Cassettes WERE hip-hop." | | | | On Tape
Three lessons from the life of LOU OTTENS, inventor of the compact cassette, better known to most of us as the cassette tape, who died Saturday at age 94.
Wait, someone invented cassettes? I mean, of course someone invented them, how else would they have got here? But it's weird, isn't it?, to think of an actual person inventing something so culturally ubiquitous, so utilitarian, so impossible to imagine life without. Who invented buttons? Wait, maybe you *can* imagine life without, since you've probably been living without the entirety of this century, which may be pretty much the entirety of your life. But anyway, the point is, magnetic tapes, how do they work?
Convenience. Ottens, who was head of product development at PHILIPS' factory in Hasselt, Belgium, in the early 1960s, thought tape machines should be easier to use than reel-to-reel recorders, which he himself, for example, had a hard time using. ("The cassette," one of his colleagues told documentary filmmaker ZACK TAYLOR, "was born from the clumsiness of a very clever man.") And they should be portable. The tapes themselves, Ottens believed, should fit in a pocket. So he asked his team to basically shrink those reels and put them inside a plastic casing. The last thing on his mind was sound quality. Just make it easy, that was the directive. But also, be ready to pivot. MARC MASTERS, who's writing a book about the history of cassettes, shared an anecdote on Twitter about how Ottens' original design was for a tool to record interviews and nature sounds, not music. The first prototype had 20 minutes of recording time per side. "Then we came to the conclusion that [the sound quality] was much better than we had anticipated," Ottens remembered. So he changed the specs to 30 minutes per side—enough to record almost any album side.
You could argue that the history of modern music consumption flows entirely from there. The SONY WALKMAN (which, beginning nearly two decades later, would play the very tapes Ottens invented). The IPOD. The IPHONE. This man invented putting music in your pocket.
But, again, he wasn't necessarily thinking about music at first, which leads to lesson #2: organic growth. Ottens wanted to make it easier to tape bird calls. He wasn't thinking about the punk bands 15 years in his future who couldn't afford to walk into a recording studio, never mind press an album, but who could bring a portable tape recorder into their basement and start disrupting the world with that cheap, tiny machine. He wasn't thinking about future hip-hop fanatics spreading their culture by trading tapes of what DJs played at parties (great quote from mixtape DJ RON G in ZACK TAYLOR's film CASSETTE: A DOCUMENTARY MIXTAPE: "Without cassettes, people wouldn't have the memory of last night. Think about that"). He wasn't thinking about people slaving all night to make mixtapes for the objects of their affection. He didn't decide what his tool should be for. He just thought it should exist.
Which it wouldn't have, not for very long, without #3: Compatibility. With rival companies in Japan trying to develop their own cassette, he convinced Philips to license his invention to them for free, and worked with those competitors to create a standard to make sure any cassette manufactured anywhere would work with any cassette player manufactured anywhere. My five-year-old SONOS speakers don't work with Sonos' own current app. Ottens' cassettes worked in one of those Japanese companies' Walkman a generation later, and, tape decay notwithstanding, they'll play just fine in any machine you can find today, nearly 60 years later.
"Cassettes are time travel, right?," writer ROB SHEFFIELD says in Taylor's documentary "If, God forbid, the day would come that I don't remember the SECRET STARS or I don't remember the RAINCOATS or I don't remember the SOFTIES, I'll be able to go through a shoebox of these tapes and go, like, yup, this. I remember this. I will not forget this. These moments that would otherwise be lost in time like tears and rain."
So someone invented time travel. He invented hip-hop, too, And punk-rock. And mixtapes. And GRATEFUL DEAD fans. Oh, and he did his best to kill his own baby. Still at Philips in the early '80s, he was on the team that invented the CD. "If there are better products than cassette, well, then you stop," he says in the documentary. "I don't believe in eternity." RIP to a music giant.
Etc Etc Etc
Yes, JEM ASWAD, that's a great PHOEBE BRIDGERS profile in Variety, but the real score was getting Phoebe's mom to give you a guided tour of her photo album. Mom on 7th grade Phoebe playing at a school festival: "That's an AMOEBA [record store] shirt she's wearing—don't think for a second it was chosen casually"... While Texas says no to masks and social distancing, musicians in Dallas and Austin say yes... Martian "rock" music... Spotify has settled the licensing dispute with K-pop label KAKAO that caused hundreds of tracks to go missing from the service.
Rest in Peace
BILL HARKIN, the architect who designed GLASTONBURY's first Pyramid Stage.
| | | | Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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