Bow Wow Wow

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Pity the poor cassette.With its obituary recently written by the esteemed Washington Post, its shelf space shrinking amongst the rising tide of recordable and rewritable compact discs, and its cache plummeting faster than the value of some colorful but ultimately meaningless Third World currency, it may finally be time to bid adieu to the technology first cooked up by a chemist from Dresden.

When it shuffles off, the humble cassette will find it has plenty of company on the Island of Misfit Recording Media. There it will join the Roosevelt-era wire recording, the crackly, Serge Gainsbourg-y 78-RPM record, and, that ultimate embodiment of 1970s cool, the 8-track tape. No big loss, right? After all, in how many formats can one reasonably be expected to own "Detroit Rock City"? (Besides, I still don't know how the damned things worked.)

But it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time in a land far away and long ago, in a mystical place populated by zitty guys in anoraks who were possessed of limitless knowledge of even the most obscure 4AD bands, the cassette was king. From a perch high above the record bins, it lorded over its kingdom.

For the first time, it was cheap and easy to record your favorite records and share them with your pals. And it wasn't long before the music geeks' love-letter, the mix tape, made its ascendance, gauzily bedecked in sleeves cut from magazine covers and painstakingly scotch-taped together.

It even spawned its own musical movement. Anyone remember the brief flowering of so-called C86 bands -- those practitioners of guitar pop that included Primal Scream, The Wedding Present, My Bloody Valentine, and The Shop Assistants?

Of course, the movement really took its name from that series of free compilation cassettes included with a run of The New Musical Express. But such was the power of the cassette, the mix tape really, that a whole movement of bands sprung up around it.

Of course, the cassette had to go. The initial siege came almost immediately. In the 1980s, the recording industry began its first crusade to stamp out the scourge of home taping. In hysterical tones that wouldn't have sounded out of place at the Salem Witch Trials, stuffy guys in expensive suits, coke spoons covered under their silk shirts, proclaimed that the cassette was going to kill the music industry.

The popular response? "Home taping is killing the music industry," screamed one punk publication. "Keep up the good work." Such was the danger that pop auteur Malcolm McLaren and his band of teenage misfits Bow Wow Wow even managed to cook up a song about it: "C30, C60, C90, GO"!

Of course, the paranoia was misplaced. The record industry (as much as some hoped it would) didn't come crumbling down, and cassettes managed to co-exist peacefully with vinyl until the compact disc came along and effectively sounded the death knell for both of them.

Which brings me to my current lament. What the death of the cassette really means is the death of the mix tape as we know it. And that's really got me down. Now, I know there are those out there who will argue on behalf of the CD-R and tell me that you can cram much more music onto a single CD-R than you can onto a 90-minute cassette. And that would be correct. The recording capacity of a CD-R positively dwarfs the capacity of the humble cassette.

But, fan of technology that I am, I'm going to miss making mix tapes on cassette for reasons that are a little more tactile. Full disclosure time: I've been making quarterly mix tapes since I was 18 years old. It's an obsessive's hobby, I know. But it's one of my few vices. Looking over them the other night, I was able to track how my musical tastes have changed over the years (not that much), and I was able to deduce what was going on in my history at the time.

Now, granted, you can do the same thing with a mix CD-R, but one of the beauties of a cassette is that you pretty much have to sit through the whole thing and listen to the songs in the order in which they were recorded. None of this setting the CD-player on random or programming in your favorite tunes.

That's one of the things we lose with the death of the cassette: the patience of actually listening to music and letting it enfold us. Now, instead, you can simply shuttle around, adding and dropping tunes as you see fit, essentially destroying the intent of the recordist who made the mix tape in the first place.