Auto Reverse and Noise Reduction- the time I tried to go to Cassette Store Day
“Are you guys here for Cassette Store Day?”
The whole thing sounds like a joke—and the mere idea of a
“Cassette Store Day” has become incredibly polarizing to the hipster elite on
the Internet. For the people immersed in cassette culture—guys that run tape
labels out of their efficiency apartments—the argument has been made that this
is going to bastardize the idea of people listening to music on tapes; the same
way that original idea behind Record Store Day was eventually lost behind who
could release the most excessive, overpriced ephemera, that would cause music
nerds to line up outside of a record shop hours before opening.
There are the people that just “don’t get” the concept that
people could choose to listen to music on a format like a cassette tape. These
are also the people that can barely wrap their brain around the resurgence and
overabundance of vinyl, or the fact that people still buy compact discs. These are the
people that probably don’t listen to music at all, or if they do, they buy
everything from iTunes, and their music collection becomes just a bunch of data
compressed down onto their computer.
And then there’s someone like me. I listen to tapes. Or as I tell people when
challenged about it—“I mos def fucks with tapes.” I became interested in the
cassette label culture about two years ago. Once you find one, thanks to the
Internet and sites like Bandcamp, you fall into what seems like an endless
abyss of small labels selling limited edition runs of experimental music on
tape.
While I no longer have hardly any of the cassettes of my
childhood and early teen years, and my car only has a c.d. player in it—I never
got rid of my tape deck from my home stereo. And after realizing what kind of
abyss of tape labels was out there, I ordered a new Walkman online.
For an independent band that may never make it out of their
hometown, it was proposed to me on the way back from my own personal Cassette
Store Day debacle, that not every album ever has to be pressed on wax. Since
vinyl is the go-to format of choice these days among serious music listeners, just about every band surmises they need
to release their music on LP. If you have an LP to your name, well shit, then
you are like a legit artist. You’ve got merch to sell. You’ve got, like, a
couple hundred copies of your album that are going to sit around your house,
gathering dust.
Cassettes, on the other hand, whether professionally
duplicated, or home-dubbed in real-time, is a very economical option for an
artist that has a dire need for their music to be available in some physical
format.
When Cassette Store Day was announced, I scoured the list of
participating stores, expecting to see the inclusion of Minneapolis’s own the
Electric Fetus. They were (thankfully) not, but I was very relieved to see that
a record store in White Bear Lake, MN—like exactly an hour from where I
live—would be a participating store. The
list of CSD special releases had the obvious marquee names—The Flaming Lips and
Deerhunter—cult following reissues—At The Drive-In—and then a rather lengthy
roll call of the INDIEST of the indie—bands on labels like Graveface, or up and
coming P4K-approved acts like Waxahatchee and HAIM.
In the days leading up to Cassette Store Day, I happened
across a piece by Corey Deiterman, a writer for the Houston TX equivalent of
Minneapolis’s City Pages. His piece
is entitled, “Cassette Store Day is the Dumbest Thing Ever,” and he goes on,
for a really long time, to talk about how inferior the cassette is, how “hipster
culture” is to blame for this event, how it’s kitschy and how mp3 players are
so convienent and swell and how Spotify playlists take the place of mix tapes
and are the best thing ever; but in the end he comes to the conclusion that
he’ll go to a store and by an At The Drive-In reissue anyway, and how he is a
cool guy for being self-aware enough to know that’s a dumb thing to do.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s the op-ed piece
called, “It’s Just a Cassette,” by P4K staff-writer Nick Sylvester. Full
disclosure—Sylvester runs a tape label, and the general crux of his tome is how
there is no more personal form of music than the cassette.
In the car, on the way up to White Bear Lake, it’s decided
that we will either be a) the only ones there at this record store, of b) there
will actually be a lot of people there. Traveling with my friends Michael and
George, as we cruise into White Bear Lake, the talk in the car turns from
talking about Kanye West to wondering where the fuck this record store actually
is. Are all the cars parked on the street people here for Cassette Store Day?
Should we roll down the window and yell at some random resident of WBL—“Ayo,
where the cassettes at?”
After aimlessly driving two blocks, then making a left,
George and Michael start to yell “THERE IT IS!” frantically instructing me to
pull into a parking lot. We see it in the distance—a white sign, with black
letters, that simply says “Records.” After we park and exit, we approach the
tiny shop with both trepidation and excitement.
“Are you guys here for Cassette Store Day?” the man sitting
behind a computer, behind the counter, asks us.
Well yes. Yes we are.
“I don’t know if you heard,” he begins, “but they were
unable to secure American distribution for the releases, so we were only able
to get the tapes on Burger Records for a reasonable price. The other ones would
have been considered imports, and they would have been, like, $12 a tape.”
This man, he continues talking, but I can barely hear him
over the sound of my heart sinking, and my rage boiling over.
“We have our own tape label here with releases by local
artists—those are $4 apiece. You guys are LITERALLY in the back yard of the
land of the 3M executives that developed the Philips-invented cassette tape. My
own dad worked in 3M’s magnetic tape division—he’s 82 years old!”
Michael, George, and myself are silent, taking it all in.
Taking in the overpriced records hanging on the wall. Taking in the random
t-shirts, all size “large,” strewn about. Taking in the talk of various
Minneapolis music scene names that are dropped—The Suburbs keep coming up for
some reason.
Dumbfounded, we begin to browse at what is available. There
are the two Cassette Store Day releases—one tape by Twink, which the shop owner
puts on, and it is excruciatingly awful; the other by Suicidal Tendencies,
which later, in the parking lot, I will joke about being overcome by due to
today’s fiasco.
In the back corner of the store, by a window, there are a
few racks of cassttes—most of them priced at $2. George pulls down a Maxell C90
out of the lot and holds it in front of my face—it appears to be a Nine Inch
Nails mix tape, featuring both Pretty
Hate Machine and the Broken EP.
Later, I find a dubbed copy of Public Enemy’s 1994 effort Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age with liner notes crudely photocopied.
Forgotten about in a box on the bottom shelf are hundreds,
if not thousands, of Static-X stickers, promoting the band’s album Start A War. These may or may not have
been free.
Eventually, after about ten minutes, we all stumble back out
into the parking lot. There’s a moment where the three of us are standing in a
circle, staring at one another, overtaken by the disbelief of what just
happened.
Prior to getting back into the car for an angry, hour-long
drive back home, we walk around the block to see what else White Bear Lake has
to offer. A used bookstore I almost want to go into to browse, but can’t take
any more disappointment this morning; a café with patrons eating outside; a sad
instrument shop with a clerk that seems to give zero fucks about anything when
we walk through the door. We pass a trash can, where I take the list of
cassettes I wanted to get out of my pocket, crumple it up, and throw it away.
The drive back gives us time to try to processes what occurred—and
if this problem of “American distribution” was an issue at every US store
participating in Cassette Store Day, or if it was specific to our attempt to
celebrate. As I drive, Michael and George are internetting on their phones, looking
on Google and searching #cassettestoreday on Twitter.
"Search 'Cassette Store Day fail'," Michael suggests.
The drive back also gives us time to vent our frustrations
with the shitty proprietor of White Bear Lake’s only record store—why even
bother participating in an event like this if you aren’t going to spend the
money to get the merchandise into the store? When people do walk in, why bore
them to death with talk of 3M and your own shitty tape label that no one gives
a fuck about? Why are you trying to be a “Minneapolis connected” store when you
are in the far northeastern suburbs? Why are you selling fucking bootleg copies
of a goddamn Public Enemy album that’s twenty years old? WHY ARE THERE SO MANY
STATIC-X STICKERS IN THIS BOX?
After dropping off George and then Michael, I drive back
home. My wife, who has excited for my friendship opportunity and for my
cassette-related excursion, asks me how it went.
“Horrible,” I say, and I proceed to explain my big sob story
to her.
The truth is that this isn’t the end of the world. My life
will continue on without these cassettes. I didn’t need any of them to live.
This is a quintessential “first world problem.” The real issue is that this
record shop owner knowingly took advantage of a captive audience—I guess this
could be considered a bait and switch, of sorts. On the store’s Facebook page,
while in the car, George discovers a lengthy post which is, pretty much, word
for word what we were told when we walked through the doors. Underneath that,
the shop owner the posted two comments—
“Thanks to the early
birds! Best first hour the store has ever done!”
and
“Already made more $$$
in 90 minutes than all of last week COMBINED!”
Towards the end of the day, there was this post—
“Second best day we’ve
ever had in sales today. THANK YOU!”
In between that second post, and the third, is something
that I couldn’t stop myself from writing—
You maybe want to let
people know that you didn’t get tapes sooner than the day of the event. Some
people drove over an hour to get to your store. So, thanks a bunch.
That post has one “like,” from the shop owner himself.
While I will always remember the first c.d. I bought, and I
have very vivid memories of early vinyl purchases, I don’t recall the first
cassette I bought. I remember sending my mom to K-Mart to get the self-titled
New Kids on The Block tape when I was in probably first grade. I remember the
first thing I ever bought with the Parental Advisory sticker was a cassette
copy of The Downward Spiral—an
artifact I had no problem shelling out $10 at an antique mart in Chicago to
repurchase. I remember the various colors of Walkmans I had. I remember making
mix tapes to listen to in my first car—an old, beat up, white mini-van.
I understand that the nostalgic idea behind cassette culture
isn’t going to resonate with everyone. And I understand that the idea of buying
a “new” tape is just maybe too much for some to grasp. That’s unfortunate—there’s
a narrow-minded barrier put up because it’s on an antiquated, obsolete format.
If you can’t look past that, there’s some really incredible music out there you
are missing out on, just because you can’t mindlessly plunk down $9.99 in the
iTunes store to download it.
In his piece on why Cassette Store Day is the “dumbest thing
ever,” Corey Deiterman pulls some street cred and quotes “NY State of Mind,” by
Nas: “Don’t put me in your box if your
shit eats tapes.” What Deiterman seems to be getting at is how easily a
tape could be destroyed by the device meant to play it—again, emphasizing how
cassettes are stupid and why on earth would anyone want to celebrate A WHOLE
DAY dedicated to them? However, he is taking Nas’s lyric completely out of
context. What Nas is saying is simply that he’s an incredible MC, so if your
boombox is unreliable, please don’t play your copy of Illmatic in it. He deserves better than that.
There’s a quote that comes to mind to counter that—from “Juicy”
by The Notorious B.I.G.: “I let my tape
rock ‘til my tape popped.”