Mixtape

Only we didn’t call it that here in India.

You could go to the neighbourhood cassette store, give them a list of songs and a blank tape, and they would record your selection for a small fee that was no patch on the cost of the original. Often your list would be a curation that drew from multiple albums. No problem.

If you had a two-in-one with a dual deck, you would record songs off the radio, and even if the sound quality was not great, there was happiness in the thought that you could play them back any time you wanted. The dual deck also allowed us to copy tapes from friends who had access to the albums we had heard about—in magazines like JS or mentioned on Radio Ceylon (later Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation) which was so much cooler than our own English Yuva Vani on All India Radio, which, even in the late 1970s, filled its supposedly youthful airtime with Jim Reeves and Perry Como, pushing the envelope just a bit with The Carpenters. Sharing music had not been as easy with vinyl records—people guarded them jealously; they could be scratched or break. When a friend whose parents had bought her the Beatles’ Abbey Road, we all crowded into her house to listen to the new album in its entirety, a real treat after having heard a few of the songs on the radio.

But back to the wonders of the cassette tape and the even more miraculous twin deck player. My father returned from a trip to Canada with multicolored TDK blank cassettes that we used to colour code our music collection—purple for his Carnatic music, orange for my pop, and green for Hindi and Tamil film songs. I don’t remember too many “original” albums on that shelf; it was all shared music. That was just the way it was, words like piracy and “ripping” did not exist in our lexicon. Even years later, friends who lived abroad would bring tapes full of the latest music (or music that was hard to find in India) for us, the sleeves laboriously inked in with the names of songs. In my own 1980s collection, Side A might have squeezed in Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat while Side B might have a mix of Helen Reddy, Joan Baez and Carole King.

In the mid-1980s, T-series flooded the market with cheap prerecorded cassettes of Indian film music and devotionals, and the need to copy songs from each other, or rip them off the radio, decreased. But we would still go to the neighborhood music store with our specially curated lists, and a blank cassette, and we would have it, our own playlist. Add to this that portable marvel called the Walkman, and the consumption of music was transformed forever—cultural studies scholars Paul de Gay, Stuart Hall and others explain this brilliantly in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman.

But the cassette tape and the recorder—even the single deck instrument—allowed us to do much more than copy music and create our own playlists, or become a means of carrying music around for our personal, private listening pleasure. Even without a fancy mike, we could record, erase, and re-record ourselves, create a simple audio story, send voice notes across time and space, inexpensively and easily. True, spool tape decks had allowed us to do that for a few decades, but until magnetic tape was packaged into a light, secure plastic package, it did not become something that we could conveniently transport. Moreover, the large reel-to-reel players were bulky and expensive, hardly meant for mass consumption in a country like India. When we were separated from family by an ocean and many time zones in a pre-Internet era when international phone calls could stretch a graduate student’s budget, we mailed padded envelopes of cassette tapes with messages, everyday notes and songs from my daughters to their grandparents. When my cousin wanted to introduce the family to his fiancée, they sent us a tape that we all crowded around the player to listen to, marveling at her lovely voice, a little shy, a little expectant. Now, with the ease of VOIP and voice notes on messaging apps, all of this seems quaint and hardly worth noting.

The RadioLab series Mixtape places the humble cassette at the centre of a series of historical transformations, according to it a catalytic role in phenomena as far removed as Ayatollah Khomeni’s rise to power in Iran and the development of the Internet. As they note on the home page of the special series, produced by RadioLabber Simon Adler, “They were recordable, rewritable, spliceable, compact, mobile. For the first time they allowed you to move through the world and listen to a voice speaking only to you.” Adler raises the curtain on the five-part series in this YouTube video, crediting this invention with “[fracturing] the media landscape” and “[splicing] reality”—terms that we might today reserve for digital technology, primarily the Internet.

Mixtape, while offering a richly textured slice of media history that positions this technology within the social, cultural and political landscape of the various contexts it describes, is the kind of storytelling that one has come to expect from RadioLab. There are sharply drawn characters, nuggets of information that would be mined by any trivia enthusiast, and in each episode, narratives that prompt one to raid the history shelves for more.

It also made me want to examine the role of the cassette tape in my own personal history, the impulse for archiving that it generated, in a way that was significantly different from keeping a diary. It was personal, yet meant to be shared. It was the encapsulation of a moment in time and space, yet meant to gain some sort of permanence (even though a jab of the red button on the player would erase it all in a minute). For many of us, it was the first time we heard ourselves, the strangeness of our own voices relayed back to us through those tiny spools. It was the first time we thought about the possibility of recording the everyday in sound.

These histories are still accessible to us, they exist in living memory. As technologies race to one upgrade after another, it’s easy to forget the ways in which we wrote, spoke, shared and transmitted experience and thought. Media objects are, as Radiolab’s Mixtape suggests and as historian Lisa Gitelman emphasizes, both material and immaterial, and nested within the histories of other, older, technologies. As we understand the many routes to their development, deployment, and use, we can often discover new meanings and relationships about their relationship to our own individual and collective histories.