Marshall McLuhan electrified cultural discourse with his 1964 pronouncement "The Medium is the Message," which shifted the discussion from aesthetic mediums to electronic media. As a critic, I could not give up the idea of the medium as a continuing source of meaning; so in my mind I converted McLuhan's slogan to "The Medium is the Memory."
—Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, 2010
I spent yesterday afternoon trying to start writing a paper for a conference on music, art, and social theory. The research I'm doing right now is on the early history of the compact disc and the marketing of it in the mid-1980s as a medium that can offer perfect fidelity. I was born in 1981, so I don't actually remember any of that.
The first CD I can remember hearing was MC Hammer's Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. This would have been in 1990; I was probably not yet nine years old. I remember it exactly: a Saturday morning, curled up in my parents' bed with my brother, listening to an album that he and I had already owned on cassette (the store-bought kind) for a few months.
Back then, my mother worked in the Eaton's Center building downtown, and she would routinely wander through the mall on her lunch break. Which meant, because her need to buy things was and remains pathological, that she would regularly come home with stuff for us. One day she came home with a cassette copy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack. We loved that thing so much—it's sitting in a stack of cassettes on a shelf in my dining room as I type this—and she was the kind to pay attention to details like who sang which songs we liked on a movie soundtrack. A few months later, she came home with that MC Hammer cassette (the first song on the TMNT soundtrack was by him). The Hammer CD came to us, along with World Power by the rap/R&B group Snap! (the one before "Rhythm is a Dancer"), from a co-worker of hers, whose daughter got those two CDs for her birthday but "only likes classical." Midway through the first song of our very first CD, my mother asked, "Doesn't this sound better?"
The CD player was in my parents' room. This was 1990; we only had one. According to my research, a CD player was still $1,000 in 1984, when the first American CD manufacturing plant opened in Terre Haute, Indiana and US sales figures for CDs rose from $17.2 to $103.3 million in one year.1Which begs the question: how much did CD players gross that year? For an account of the compact disc in this period, see the first chapter of Steve Knopper's excellent Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age (New York: Free Press, 2009), pp. 15-35. I don't know what a CD player would have cost by January of 1989, but that was when we got one. It must have still been quite expensive domestically, because my parents went to great trouble to lug one home with us after a Winter trip to Hong Kong to visit our grandparents. I remember that too: my dad freaking out at the baggage handler as he was gingerly laying this thing, packed in something like five different padded boxes, on the conveyer belt.
But you know, it didn't sound any better to my young ears. I was eight; how was I supposed to know how music was expected to sound? It was all just beats and loud noises to me. And for years, our CD collection never grew beyond two. My first (and most listened-to) copy of Nirvana's Nevermind was a Maxell cassette, dubbed from another kid in school's CD. Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Blind Melon, Smashing Pumpkins—all cassettes. When they took us to the store, why would we buy two CDs when we could get three cassettes for the same money? I'm pretty sure I even had to pay a kid in school a dollar to dub Siamese Dream for me, but that was a bargain compared to $14 for the CD at the Music World in the mall. Plus, we had an old beat up dual cassette deck boombox in our room that our aunt left with us when she graduated from university, and there was still just the one CD player in my parents' room. You could also listen to tapes on the bus.2At the time, listening to a discman was like watching streaming video on an outdated computer with distant, stolen wi-fi—not that we had a discman yet anyway.
For almost my entire music listening life until I moved away for college, my mother would come into my room and yell at me for listening to tapes. "The first tape sounds bad enough already. Why would you tape it onto a second tape?" Part of this was because she hated music where the singer, in her words, "is just moaning"—the worst offender was Alice in Chains, which was one of my brother's first loves; the band's atonal harmonies, combined with the cassette's hiss and flattening out of the music's dynamics, was just too depressing for her to tolerate (LPs that got the most play in our house growing up: Carly Simon, Lionel Ritchie, the Bee Gees). The clearest example of this "moan" aesthetic that comes to mind is the Alice in Chains-esque harmony at the end of "All Apologies," the last track on the last Nirvana album In Utero: the line "All in all is all we are" repeats as the instruments fall one by one out of the arrangement, the harmonizing voices slowing down unevenly and eventually falling out of time with one another, and the melodic line (a descending major scale) starting to drag at the end so that the landing note falls from major to minor (the last two lines are just guitar feedback and two voices, slightly out of time and atonal, the harmony still in a major key, the melody now minor). The album may as well have ended with a thud. Shortly after April 1994, we were listening to this song on one of my mixtapes in the car and my brother said: "Did he [Kurt Cobain] drop dead at the end of the song?"
But, to me, this music just sounded right on second and third (or seventh) generation cassette dubs. Our old two-deck boombox was not in the greatest shape, so the dubbing deck spun slightly slower than the playing deck; for years, I'd play the actual CDs and they would sound wrong—they were too fast, they didn't drag. I made mixtapes with sixth or seventh-generation dubs of songs like Nirvana's "Blew," which were by that point more tape than recording.3I listened to these hissy tapes on my walkman on the bus; ever try listening to drony music on an airplane? You should. The CDs also sounded too clear, particularly the high notes. Now that I think back, what we called "grunge" at the time must have prepared me for the low rumble of the Seattle band Earth's 1993 drone metal now-classic Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version. I had known who Earth were for years, because Kurt was a close friend and vocal supporter of the band, but I didn't actually hear them until 1998, when I saw Nick Broomfield's regrettable documentary Kurt and Courtney.4Earth guitarist Dylan Carlson plays a large role in the film, Broomfield's version of the events giving new meaning to the West Coast rapper Xzibit's 1996 line "See I lent my shotgun to Kurt Cobain, and the motherfucker never brought it back." That song features slowed and pitched-down vocals... coincidence? I won't pretend that my first reaction to finally hearing Earth wasn't, "What the hell is this?" (and not in an awestruck, my-mind-is-being-blown way.) But that album, along a few others,5This list includes: Maryanne Amacher's Sound Characters, Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music; tracks from Sonic Youth's Washing Machine and Oval's 94 Diskont; certain ambient works by Brian Eno; and LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House in SoHo. It's been a long process, this coming to terms with pop music's (and contemporary culture at large's) "chronophobia," and it has developed unevenly: an epiphanic viewing of Gus Van Sant's film Gerry in 2003, after Wm. Steven Humphrey called it "worse than the Holocaust"; a screening of Andy Warhol's Sleep a couple of years ago helping me to retroactively understand why I had been so impacted by Michael "5000" Watts in the middle of the decade; Neu! 2 and a recital of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians by the SIGNAL Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY; I'll try to deal with some of this in future blog entries. ended up fundamentally changing the way I think about—and, moreover, redefining the way that I actually experience—aesthetic experience. I think I was always aware that I responded particularly strongly to time and slowness, even when I was listening to nothing but 1'30" hardcore songs, but I think most of what that actively meant to me corresponded to a different kind of slowness.
Beyond the literal slowness of dubbed cassettes, there was the romance of cassettes, which is to say the romance of the mixtape, private or carried around and forcibly shoved into anyone and everyone's car cassette decks, kept and given away, sent and—like the most personal of letters—unsent. Mixtapes were also slow. It was a traumatic thing for me to start college in the Fall of 1999 and have no one to make mixtapes for. Everyone listened to music either on the CD-ROM drives of their computers or on crappy little clock radio CD players, which by this point did not come with even one cassette deck.6Napster famously spread like wildfire across college campuses that Fall, but I went to a predominantly Apple-using school (Steve Jobs had attended, and dropped out, of my college), and the early Mac version of Napster didn't work nearly as well as the PC version. Like most other technological revolutions, the impact of the mp3 revolution was belated at Reed College—and its students, many of them proto-hipster Luddite purists, wore this as a badge of honour. And it was college, so who had a car?
I arrived at college with boxes of CDs, vinyl records, and cassette tapes, and a CD player with two built-in cassette decks, an old pawn shop record player, and a preamp that interceded between the two machines. My amassing of music in all of these mediums began as financial necessities. In the earliest moment, cassettes at the store were $8 or $9, while a CD would have cost $14. And, of course, dubbed cassettes only cost $1.00—the price of the blank cassette. Then, when I was thirteen, I discovered the Columbia House Music Club and how to manipulate its payment system, which in addition to building my soon-to-be ridiculously large CD "collection," also began my love affair with receiving things in the mail. By the time I was fifteen, after I had sworn off any and all music disseminated by major labels, Columbia House was no longer an option. This being a decade before deluxe 180 gram reissues and vinyl record collector nostalgia, I bought a Pansy Division 7" and the Circle Jerks LP Group Sex for a combined $11. Because it was an old, then-obscure hardcore punk record from the early '80s and not a hot major label release—which at the time music stores were selling at a loss ($11 for any new top 20 release) to attract buyers to their home theater system showrooms—that Circle Jerks CD alone would have been $18.99. A few days after buying those two records, and taping them on my friend Jonathan's record player so I could listen to them, I went to the pawn shop and picked up an old turntable for $15.
But listening to music across three mediums became a matter of process. And more often than not, the medium that integrated them was the cassette. The making of mixtapes involved a rich and complex nexus of creating, editing, revising, handling physical objects, operating technologies from three different eras, and most importantly listening. One could not do this quickly. I did not own a computer with a CD burner until 2005, though I'd had access to them with varying degrees of regularity since 1999. But the "mix CD" wasn't quite the same thing as a mixtape. For one thing, it took an hour to burn a full-length CD-R in 1999. Which would have been fine—it takes longer to make a mixtape—only you didn't actually get to listen to your "mix" as it was burning; if you tried, the likely result would be the drive stalling, usually near the end of the writing process, and you had to chuck out that useless piece of plastic and start again. And even if the technological apparatus didn't falter—in its early days, the writable CD-Rom drive often stalled even if you left the computer alone for the duration of the burning process—the CD-R was permanent. If you made a mistake in compiling the mix, you had to start again.7Except in the case of the rewritable CD-RW, which was more expensive and even more time consuming and never caught on commercially. And, of course, you couldn't later record over a CD-R when tastes or feelings changed—an affective and emotionally cathartic wiping clean of the slate, so to speak; with the CD-R, you just chucked it in the trash. In the iTunes era, it can take less than two minutes to compile and burn a mix CD; but all it takes is another thirty seconds for the recipient to insert the disc into a combo-drive and reconvert its tracks back into mp3s, the mix itself destined to be lost in the shuffle of. . . well, the shuffle.
Ultimately, the slowness of listening to cassettes and the slow process of making cassettes are connected for me. And the connection has its root in the medium itself. The infinite repeatability of the listening experience of the CD, unlike the cassette's "degradation" of sound quality and slow muffling of recorded sound to the point where you hear the tape more than music, threatens our capacity to remember our listening experiences. The digital music file, whether recorded onto a compact disc or in the form of an immaterial mp3, m4a, or FLAC file, seems more to represent the possibility of listening than it offers the experience of listening itself. Our worn and faded cassette tapes are a monument to listening, and this includes our anticipation of sharing the music we love with the people we love as we dub tracks onto cassettes, and our memories of listening to these cassettes with these loved others. In the wearing away of the music recorded onto it, the cassette bears the indexical traces of our listening experiences. One never hears exactly the same thing twice on a cassette, whether we are talking about the speed at which the music plays, its pitch, timbre, "fidelity," etc. And from the specificity of each listening experience of a cassette we create actual, specific memories of actual, specific listening events, as opposed to the abstract and infinite repetition of the CD's so-called "perfect playback."
At the core of the mixtape is a contradiction that gives it its emotional life, and which disappears with the mix CD, the iTunes playlist, the podcast, etc. The social life of the mixtape is as much a cliché as it is a universal figure of identification for my generation (mixtape as gift, as party soundtrack, for DJs as a medium of communication or personal statement that sometimes borders on a cry into the abyss, and of course the mixtape as love letter); but beneath the slowness I have described of the making of mixtapes also lies a very solipsistic quality. The mixtape suggests to its recipient—even when the recipient is also the maker—that this particular sequence of songs is meaningful. The mixtape therefore speaks to a desire for controlling the conditions of listening, for excising songs from their contexts on singles, albums, and compilations, from LPs, CDs, 45s, and other cassettes, and re-presenting them in a way that incarnates the maker's message, vision, and usually taste.8This can take many forms, including but not limited to: introducing the recipient to something, or, less innocently, "educating" him or her; paternalistically imposing one's taste on the recipient; attempting to impress the recipient; and, more romantically, expressing affinity between kindred spirits or like minds. At the same time, the maker's expenditure of time, effort, and emotional investment reveals something about (and perhaps is analogous to) what the recipient means to him or her. How long did it take to make? How long between the choosing of songs? How many revisions did it take? How many times was it listened to front to back before it was finally given away? But with the cassette, a measure of control over the listening experience is also lost; and it strikes me as meaningful that the degree to which this control is lost corresponds directly to how effective it is—which is to say how many times its recipient has listened to it. A flat, old worn-out and laggy mixtape is the most well-loved kind; but it sounds least like it did when it was made.9This paragraph is indebted to feedback from my friend Patrik. It continues our decades-long discussion about why we are both so in love with music, dating back to fourth grade, when we made the driver play the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack cassette on the school bus. Patrik's record label released a 7" EP by the artist Memory Cassette, from which my title is drawn.
I want to end where I began: with a memory about a compact disc. Five years ago, I made my loved one a mix CD called "29 Pop Songs." I did not yet love her, but we had already grown very close in the several months that we'd known each other. A few weeks earlier, she mentioned that she was looking for new music and asked me for a mix. Shortly after, she broke up with her longtime boyfriend. That mix CD was meant as a get-well-soon gift to a dear friend who eventually became much more. We've listened to the mix many times over the years, sung along to every word on numerous road trips, but we never listened to the actual CD-R. In fact, I don't know that the actual piece of plastic I gave her was ever actually played before or after she ripped it to her laptop, then transferred it to her iPod. We still have that piece of plastic, on the face of which I'd scrawled "29,"10Okay, I wrote "29" to look like the "69" on the cover of the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, so who am I trying to kid, Alex? I liked you a bit... still enclosed in the folded-over paper sleeve that I printed the title and track listing on—and the smile on her face when she found it last month, unpacking after a move, killed me. But then she filed it away somewhere, and I don't think either of us could tell you where it is right now. In those moments between her saying, "Look what I found?" and putting it away again, I looked at this lifeless thing, its sleeve all worn and crumpled up but the music on it still probably sounding like the day it came out of my laptop's CD drive, and I noticed that it didn't seem to bear any of the affection she has for that mix. The actual mix lives somewhere else, and I can't give that place any name other than our relationship. But that piece of dead plastic, in its crumpled paper sleeve, can only reveal a life of neglect, buried for years under piles of god knows what in a box we kept moving year after year though we didn't really know why. If that CD-R bears no apparent relation either to the mix it contains or to Alex's and my relationship, I'd like to think that somewhere there's a cassette that somebody listens to everyday, that changes, grows, and slows down as we do.
1. Which begs the question: how much did CD players gross that year? For an account of the compact disc in this period, see the first chapter of Steve Knopper's excellent Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age (New York: Free Press, 2009), pp. 15-35.
2. At the time, listening to a discman was like watching streaming video on an outdated computer with distant, stolen wi-fi—not that we had a discman yet anyway.
3. I listened to these hissy tapes on my walkman on the bus; ever try listening to drony music on an airplane? You should.
4. Earth guitarist Dylan Carlson plays a large role in the film, Broomfield's version of the events giving new meaning to the West Coast rapper Xzibit's 1996 line "See I lent my shotgun to Kurt Cobain, and the motherfucker never brought it back." That song features slowed and pitched-down vocals. . . coincidence?
5. This list includes: Maryanne Amacher's Sound Characters, Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music; tracks from Sonic Youth's Washing Machine and Oval's 94 Diskont; certain ambient works by Brian Eno; and LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House in SoHo. It's been a long process, this coming to terms with pop music's (and contemporary culture at large's) "chronophobia," and it has developed unevenly: an epiphanic viewing of Gus Van Sant's film Gerry in 2003, after Wm. Steven Humphrey called it "worse than the Holocaust"; a screening of Andy Warhol's Sleep a couple of years ago helping me to retroactively understand why I had been so impacted by Michael "5000" Watts in the middle of the decade; Neu! 2 and a recital of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians by the SIGNAL Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY; I'll try to deal with some of this in future blog entries.
6. Napster famously spread like wildfire across college campuses that Fall, but I went to a predominantly Apple-using school (Steve Jobs had attended, and dropped out, of my college), and the early Mac version of Napster didn't work nearly as well as the PC version. Like most other technological revolutions, the impact of the mp3 revolution was belated at Reed College—and its students, many of them proto-hipster Luddite purists, wore this as a badge of honour.
7. Except in the case of the rewritable CD-RW, which was more expensive and even more time consuming and never caught on commercially.
8. This can take many forms, including but not limited to: introducing the recipient to something, or, less innocently, "educating" him or her; paternalistically imposing one's taste on the recipient; attempting to impress the recipient; and, more romantically, expressing affinity between kindred spirits or like minds.
9. This paragraph is indebted to feedback from my friend Patrik. It continues our decades-long discussion about why we are both so in love with music, dating back to fourth grade, when we made the driver play the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack cassette on the school bus. Patrik's record label released a 7" EP by the artist Memory Cassette, from which my title is drawn.
10. Okay, I wrote "29" to look like the "69" on the cover of the Magnetic Fields album 69 Love Songs, so who am I trying to kid, Alex? I liked you a bit. . .
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