Review: 'High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape'

In the age of streaming, entertainment has become so intangible and ephemeral that it makes sense there would be some pushback. In terms of music, this is most obvious in the vinyl revival, which I consider myself a small part of as both a devoted vinyl consumer and a reviewer of vinyl reissues who excludes other formats. There's no greater antidote to a tinny stream from a tiny phone than a slab of plastic you have to pull from a lovely 12-inch jacket, wipe down, slap onto a turntable, and flip halfway through. It may sound silly, certainly self-contradictory, but vinyl returns the soul to music by making it corporeal again.

One of the weirder offshoots of the current vogue for physical media is that cassettes have made a bit of a comeback too. Clearly, I get vinyl. Cassettes? Not really. They always sounded terrible, with their hiss and muddiness. They all look alike. Their cover artwork is shrunk smaller than a CD insert. They unravel. They melt in the sun. If you were to ask me my thoughts on cassettes, I'd say they suck. 

But while reading Marc Masters's new book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, I realized my own relationship with cassettes is more complicated than this. Not as far as pre-recorded music is concerned. I think I owned about a half-dozen pre-recorded tapes when my urge to own Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, LTD., caused me to shift formats because the Record World in which I was shopping only had that Monkees album on LP. I bought the vinyl and never looked back to pre-recorded tapes. 

Blank tapes, however, were a different story. I loaded up on them, using them to make straight copies of albums I'd accumulated on LP and CD so I could listen to them in my Walkman or car, mixtapes I compiled from my collection, and, after I got my first Tascam 4-track, recordings of songs I'd written. The sound of a cassette demo was shoddy and hissy, but haunting and real in a way that recordings made with the high-tech digital recording apps so readily available today are not.

Because my story is not unique, the cassette is. Vinyl is cooler and sounds better. But you can't record on it. You can't personalize it. And the fact that cassettes were great because they personalized music is the main thrust of High Bias. Masters provides one short chapter on the format's development and role as a vessel for pre-recorded music before getting into the format's really interesting qualities: its integral role in the history of hip-hop and lo-fi indie rock, DIY music distribution, bootlegging, and Portastudio demoing. He discusses the live tape trading networks that sprung up around The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Throbbing Gristle, Sun Ra, and The Butthole Surfers. He explains the unique cassette cultures in Syria, India, and Egypt that don't really have American equivalents. He embraces the unraveling and the hiss.

 In the midst of the vinyl revival, there have been all sorts of books about that format's history, art, maintenance, and collectability. There aren't that many books about the cassette, but High Bias is provocative and satisfying enough to fill the void on its own.