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 or 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 idea 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.

Review: Lol Tolhurst's 'Goth: A History'

If you'd asked one of the original punk groups in the seventies--say, the Clash or the Sex Pistols--if they were punks, they would have sneered at you and damned the very idea of being labeled. Same goes for the original Goths--say, Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure. Lol Tolhurst, drummer of the latter group, says as much in Goth: A History. But with time comes a certain perspective, and today Tolhurst obviously embraces that old label, hence his new book celebrating some fifty years of pallor, gloomy songs, wiry hairstyles, black garb, and black moods. 

Review: 'The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book'

 

In 2019, Marvel artist Alex Ross created a mural of heroes for the comic giant's NY offices. A few years later he followed it up with the natural dark counterpart, and now Abrams ComicArts has compiled these portraits in The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book. 

Because Ross created each painting individually before situating it in the larger work, he is able to give each baddie his or her own page to be pulled out and pasted on your wall. With nothing but a plain white field for background, each colorful creep is free to pop from the book's 11" x 16" pages. 

Review: 'The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha' (Directors' Cuts series)

Paul Thomas Anderson's early career with such a clear and explosive style that you'd think he'd already been making films for decades. His debut, Hard Eight (aka: Sydney), was modest, but he went right from that to a sprawling epic (Boogie Nights) and an even more sprawling epic that was also ferociously outlandish and borderline supernatural (Magnolia). Everything about his filmmaking was so specific and consistent--from his rawly emotional and often juvenile dialogue to his actors' operatic performances to the details of his LA settings to his thrilling tonal shifts to his willingness to dive headlong into wild ideas--that Paul Thomas Anderson didn't seem as if he ever needed to stray from his wholly individual path.

Review: 'Werewolf Stories: Shape-Shifters, Lycanthropes, and Man-Beasts'

Werewolves are many things. They are scary and mystical. They are metaphors and metaphysical. They are the subjects of monsters movies, fairy tales, and folk lore. They are people who transform into four legged animals and furry two-legged weirdies that look suspiciously like Oliver Reed. They are fictions, and for a kooky few, non-fictions.

Review: 'The Monkees: Made in Hollywood'

The most tiresome avenue of inquiry when discussing the Monkees' project has always been that of whether or not they were "authentic." How Mike Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones came together as actors, not musicians, to play a band on TV and use their voices to sell records doesn't even qualify as an open secret anymore. It's simply Pop History 101. The truly fascinating part of The Monkees' story is how they staged a revolution to become authentic, how they threatened to walk out on their contracts if they weren't allowed to take charge of their own recordings to make one album fully as a band (Headquarters) and one album mostly as a band (Pisces, Aquarius...) and then continue to produce their own recordings basically as solo artists almost until the end of the enterprise in 1970, the year the most artistically controlling Monkee, Mike, split and left Micky and Davy to churn out one last record in the pre-revolution style. 

Review: 'David Bowie-Rainbowman: 1967-1980'

Originally published in French in 2019, David Bowie-Rainbowman: 1967-1980 took a rather Bowie-esque approach to telling the David Bowie story. Chronicling the career of a guy who refused to ever remain one thing, Jérôme Soligny's book was part biography, part track-by-track album guide, and part oral history. And just as Bowie compartmentalized his ch-ch-changes (sorry) via calculated character switches, Soligny's multi-faceted tome is very neatly organized. Each LP-focused chapter begins with a period-appropriate retrospective quote from the artist, himself, before moving on to the author's history of the period and track-by-track notes and finishing with retrospective comments from Bowie's acquaintances, co-workers, peers, and fans. That's a lot of material, and you really get the sense of the book's expansiveness when you lift it: Rainbowman is a 650-plus page hulking beast. 

Review: 'But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the '60s Girl Groups'

Between the original rock and roll era of Chuck, Buddy, and Bo and the British Invasion, the most happening thing happening in rock and roll was the girl group sound. Fresh, sexy, fun, and often emotionally raw, hits by The Supremes, The Marvelettes, The Ronettes, Darlene Love, The Angels, The Vandellas, The Crystals, The Shirelles, and the rest made radio worth listening to. Once The Beatles arrived in the Colonies, only the Motown groups really hung on (and let's not forget that The Supremes remained America's most unstoppable hit machine of the sixties), but the music they all made is timeless.

Review: Vinyl Debut of The Rolling Stones' 'Forty Licks'

The Rolling Stones' career can be divided very neatly into two distinct eras: the sixties, when they were restlessly searching for the sound that defines them, and everything after they'd found that sound with Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. They rarely strayed from it for the next three decades. 

The Stones' movement between labels--Decca (UK)/London (US) in the sixties, then their own Rolling Stones Records in the seventies--further separates the eras and apparently made it impossible for them to mix and mingle too much. Aside from "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses," songs recorded during the Decca/London era that were not released until the RS Records one, none of their songs crossed the labels' Iron Curtain whenever it came time to assemble yet another Stones compilation throughout the twentieth century.

Review: 'Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks That Shook the World'

Along with their myriad musical innovations, The Beatles completely changed the way men were allowed to look when the group invaded the globe with their moppy tops and slender suits. They re-popularized facial hair, made the Cuban heel ubiquitous, and made it okay for guys to wear what were traditionally gals' clothes. For fashion-focused folks, these are developments every bit as earth-quaking as the tape loops of "Tomorrow Never Knows" or the orchestral crescendos of "A Day in the Life". To them, Deirdre Kelly's new book Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks That Shook the World will be what Revolution in the Head is to people who enjoy the group's music.