Earlier this month the Canadian singer Nelly Furtado, who has sold more than 20 million singles worldwide, released an album that almost no one could find, and even fewer could listen to. That’s because the recording, “Hadron Collider,” which she made with the musician Blood Orange, was presented in a format once thought long relegated to the trash heap of tech history: the cassette tape.
Many people over 30 remember cassettes, with nostalgia, if not some disdain. And yet, for a slice of music fandom, Ms. Furtado’s choice of medium makes perfect sense. Cassettes, somehow, are making a comeback.
Go to any indie show and inevitably, among the T-shirts and knickknacks, there will be tapes. Some record labels are now cassette-only. The National Audio Co., America’s largest manufacturer of audiocassettes, reported that 2014 was its best year yet.
But before the revisionists completely rewrite my adolescence, let’s be clear about something: As a format for recorded sound, the cassette tape is a terrible piece of technology. It’s a roll of tape in a box. It’s essentially an office supply.
The cassette is the embodiment of planned obsolescence. Each time you play one it degrades. Bad sound gets worse. Casings crack in winter, melt in summer. Inescapably, a cassette tape unspools: It’s only destiny. Fine, death comes to us all. But just because we can anthropomorphize a gadget doesn’t give it a soul.
It’s true that the cassette tape is portable, affordable, disposable. But so are floppy disks and folding street maps. And condoms made from lamb intestines. All were sufficient technologies at the time — I’m not sure about the condoms — but they’ve been improved upon for the public good.
I get the nostalgic appeal. In the late ’80s, early ’90s, several hundred hours of my life were lost to the rewind button. I made mix tapes for friends, for girlfriends. I scribbled liner notes, repaired ribbon twists with a pencil in the gears. One girlfriend used to daub a spot of perfume on the tapes she made me. I loved it.
The same girlfriend bestowed on me a liking for Seal, an artist whose career faded around the same time as the cassette’s decline. Now cassettes have returned to popularity; not Seal. I’d gladly see them swap fates.
The cassette also introduced us to a new, pernicious norm. When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, it made music a private experience. No longer did the family gather around the record player. Instead, we all could privately enjoy our own media, clutching our own little rectangles, tuned out from the world. Sound like a harbinger of a familiar, contemporary doom?
And the cassette’s portability didn’t translate into ease of use. I delivered pizza in high school, which meant I spent hours coasting on sausage fumes, my car’s floorboards littered with tapes. Pearl Jam, Cypress Hill, early bootlegs of Phish shows. But if inspiration struck and I wanted to hear a certain song, by the time I’d found the right tape, the proper side, rewound or fast-forwarded sufficiently — hopefully landing on the beginning of the song and not smack-dab in the chorus — I’d already parked in the driveway.
Then there was romance. A girl, a basement, a sudden lurching scramble at the worst possible moment to stop Def Leppard from pouring sugar all over a tender situation.
Old technology can stage a comeback when it’s no longer needed. When sentiment, not function, authorizes its appeal. Maybe the cassette tape’s Achilles’ heel — its horrible audio — explains the resurgence. As a method for expressing an artist’s sound, a tape is lousy. But as a way to express yourself, your handmade cover art, your careful track selection, it’s not bad.
And it helps that the technology that followed the cassette, the CD, wasn’t much better. Too unwieldy. Too expensive. They scratched easily, they skipped erratically. And CD burners weren’t affordable for the likes of us. The cassette tape’s most appealing feature — making mixes — was gone.
We wanted portability, we wanted good-sounding music, we wanted to score the soundtracks to our lives. Part of the iPod’s appeal was that it seemed so inevitable.
My wife still keeps a box of favorite cassettes and mixtapes. She fundamentally disagrees with my point of view. Cassette tapes are awesome, she said recently, personable in a way that digital players are cold.
When I suggested that, rather than the cassette tape, maybe we should bring back the MiniDisc player, she gave me a blank look.
“Wasn’t that just an early CD player?” she said.
“Sort of,” I said. “But it was ahead of its time. The sound quality was great. It was also really good for recording.” By then she’d tuned me out.
Admittedly, the MiniDisc was silly. Cumbersome, too expensive, never widely loved. But I loved it. Maybe it just needs some new affection to get going again. Maybe an artist, a real crooner, could write a hit song about its appeal. Seal, if you’re reading this, please get in touch.
Rosecrans Baldwin is the author of the novel You Lost Me There and the memoir Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.