Thanks Lou, for allowing us to create our own mixtape.
What do you think of cassettes?
Most people write them off as an inferior form of media, remembering the days of warbled sound, too much hiss or your tape being eaten by your Walkman or boombox.
I love collecting vinyl records but I grew up with cassettes. Born in 1978, I came into the world just before the official release of the CD format in 1982. When I was young, I would take a portable cassette deck outside to the swing set, press play and then proceed to sing and swing. Cassettes were affordable and you could copy songs off the radio when money wouldn’t allow you to purchase new music. I remember recording Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown radio show which would allow me to playback all the current hits at once. I would listen so much I could often repeat Casey’s intros to the famous songs before they played.
I’ve been making mixtapes all of my life, but especially during high school and college. I’ve made mixtapes for myself, for friends and especially for girls, including my wife who still has many of the tapes I made her 20 years ago.
RIP Lou Ottens
Lou Ottens, the inventor of the cassette tape recently passed away. I was familiar with Lou from watching a documentary last year called, Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.
Throughout the documentary, Lou seems perplexed as to why people still care about the cassette. After all, he helped invent the CD which helped destroy the cassette tape market for good. He had easily moved on and didn’t consider the cassette something to romanticize.
Forgive me Lou for romanticizing just the same…
I still buy cassettes.
Whenever I’m shopping in a record or thrift store, I always try to pick up blank sealed cassettes. This past month I’ve found a few great stacks that I was able to bring home.
I love cassettes so much, I even made a couple of shirts in honor of the analog format:
But really, why should we still care about cassettes?
When talking about music and the cassette format with others, the big question for most people is really…who cares? I get it, the idea of recording on a cassette tape seems silly in 2020. But I found that when I make a mixtape it’s often pulling from songs that I’ve been listening to a lot during that time period. Those songs are often influenced by what is going on my life. So by capturing that group of songs on a cassette, I’m creating a time capsule of sorts that will be available for me to revisit later on in life and remember what was happening at that time. That being said, my 2020 mixtapes will be heavily influenced by music from a turbulent year and what will it be like to listen back in 5, 10 or 15 years and remember 2020? Of course I could do this with a Spotify playlist, but that won’t feel the same, trust me.
Cassettes can keep a personal bond together.
My father was a pastor who passed away from cancer when I was just six years old. I have the cassette tapes below of his old sermons at the church we grew up in that I can still listen to today which just seems…crazy.
One of these cassettes is the recording of his funeral service which I’ve never listened to, even 36 years later. Maybe one day I will.
I am forever grateful to Lou for inventing a media format affordable enough that a church would record their sermons and let people check them out of their library for people to take home to listen to. Because of this, I have these sermons from my father during a time when recording events on phones was not a possibility.
Cassette resources.
If you’re like me and enjoy nerding out on various formats, here are some resources I’ve found regarding cassettes that have greatly entertained me the past few weeks:
My favorite video about cassettes is from Techmoan:
My favorite YouTube account about cassettes if Cassette Comeback — the enthusiasm for cassettes and decks on this account is contagious. Just look at this awesome video about a ReVox cassette deck from the 1980s:
Thanks for reading so much about an old analog format. Cassettes can be more than just a cheap format to discard as a lost cause. Hearing of Lou’s passing this week brought back a lot of great memories regarding the cassette tape.
