L. took Cleo down to Bethesda for a girlie brunch this morning, and so I was suddenly faced, with little coursework to do in the waning weeks of the term, with a rare and exquisite dilemma: how to spend four free hours?Given how little free time we have these days, it might be fair to say that our deepest wishes are laid bare during such respites. Days of planning lectures and field trips, of picking up the carrots and peas that land in an ever widening radius around Cleo's high chair, and of waking up to the plaintive wail, only slightly muted by two intervening doors, of a suddenly awake infant who has rendered our alarm clock irrelevant, mean that to-do lists now consist of day-to-day necessities. Attending to less pressing and more refined whims simply seems impossible.
Thus, in a way, you can tell what a new parent has been really missing when they finally do have some free time. And so part of me wishes I could say that I spent the this morning volunteering in an orphanage, or reading Wordsworth, or taking a restorative stroll. But no: my priority was simpler. I simply sat for 90 minutes, reading the Sunday Times, a cup of coffee at hand, and then eventually made my way outside to do some work in the long untended garden. Nothing special; indeed, I used to spend virtually every Sunday in grad school over the Times. But, damn, I don't remember it feeling this sweet.
Anyway, one of the high points of the Times for this satisfied reader was Rob Walker's article on the fate, and the partial resurrection, of the music cassette. As he noted, in terms of popularity, the cassette's been routed: where 8.6 million were sold in 2004, last year saw that number fall to 34,000. And yet, as Walker notes, there are still fans of the cassette - users who are drawn, he says, to its easy flexibility (the mixed tape still holds a real romance for many of us who came of age in the era before recordable CDs), or to its innovative combination of portability and social listening (you try sticking an LP in a car stereo).
That all sounds more or less right to me, but I do disagree with him in one respect. Walker takes for granted the advantages of LPs when it came to design: quoting an essay on PopMatters, he concurs that records had a certain majesty, or artistic interest, that was never really rivaled by cassettes. Well, okay, in one sense: certainly, Warhol's clever album design for the Stones' Sticky Fingers, with its operable zipper, would hardly have carried much force if somehow transferred to cassette. And I do remember the sheer presence of an opened album: it felt, in its dimensions, significant.
But, by the late 1980s, cassettes could also be rather amazing, in their own modest way. Part of the reason for this, I think, was simply that the bar was set very low from the outset. If you pick up a cassette produced in the 70s, it'll almost certainly consist of a meager insert, of poor stock, that's printed on one side only. A reproduction of the album cover, a spine identifying the band and title, and then a list of the song titles beyond the second fold: that's all there was.
Or that's all there was until, in my experience, around 1986. By that point, bands were beginning - and I'm not sure why, exactly - to become much more ambitious with their cassette inserts. At first, this often simply meant a larger insert, which was folded to create the effect of pages. And those pages could contain some pretty great information: I remember an Iron Maiden cassette, for instance, that included, in a tiny font, a list of the various items they'd consumed on a recent tour. So many bottles of bourbon; so many drumsticks. More commonly, bands began to include the lyrics to their songs - and darn if we didn't end up poring over those, mouthing the words as we listened to the tracks for the first time. For some reason, I remember doing this most clearly with Terence Trent D'Arby's Neither Fish Nor Flesh. I can only recall the melodies to two songs from that cassette, but, man, was the packaging a thing of beauty.
I realize that this now sounds quaint, or even ridiculous. In an age when CDs often come with supplemental multimedia recordings, and in which one can simply look up the lyrics to a song on the Web, what I'm calling beautiful can seem rather meager. But maybe that's precisely the point. Cassettes were small, and yet they also contained what we perceived as acts of generosity - acts that unfolded, if one was lucky, as one opened the plastic case. A six-paneled page of lyrics to U2 songs, with photos of the band, may not seem like much. But it was significantly more than nothing, and I think that Walker might have acknowledged that, as well.
That all sounds more or less right to me, but I do disagree with him in one respect. Walker takes for granted the advantages of LPs when it came to design: quoting an essay on PopMatters, he concurs that records had a certain majesty, or artistic interest, that was never really rivaled by cassettes. Well, okay, in one sense: certainly, Warhol's clever album design for the Stones' Sticky Fingers, with its operable zipper, would hardly have carried much force if somehow transferred to cassette. And I do remember the sheer presence of an opened album: it felt, in its dimensions, significant.
But, by the late 1980s, cassettes could also be rather amazing, in their own modest way. Part of the reason for this, I think, was simply that the bar was set very low from the outset. If you pick up a cassette produced in the 70s, it'll almost certainly consist of a meager insert, of poor stock, that's printed on one side only. A reproduction of the album cover, a spine identifying the band and title, and then a list of the song titles beyond the second fold: that's all there was.
Or that's all there was until, in my experience, around 1986. By that point, bands were beginning - and I'm not sure why, exactly - to become much more ambitious with their cassette inserts. At first, this often simply meant a larger insert, which was folded to create the effect of pages. And those pages could contain some pretty great information: I remember an Iron Maiden cassette, for instance, that included, in a tiny font, a list of the various items they'd consumed on a recent tour. So many bottles of bourbon; so many drumsticks. More commonly, bands began to include the lyrics to their songs - and darn if we didn't end up poring over those, mouthing the words as we listened to the tracks for the first time. For some reason, I remember doing this most clearly with Terence Trent D'Arby's Neither Fish Nor Flesh. I can only recall the melodies to two songs from that cassette, but, man, was the packaging a thing of beauty.
I realize that this now sounds quaint, or even ridiculous. In an age when CDs often come with supplemental multimedia recordings, and in which one can simply look up the lyrics to a song on the Web, what I'm calling beautiful can seem rather meager. But maybe that's precisely the point. Cassettes were small, and yet they also contained what we perceived as acts of generosity - acts that unfolded, if one was lucky, as one opened the plastic case. A six-paneled page of lyrics to U2 songs, with photos of the band, may not seem like much. But it was significantly more than nothing, and I think that Walker might have acknowledged that, as well.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment