Cassette Mixtapes: Can There Be a Revival?

photo: Ollie Millington/Getty Images

Those who don’t learn from history are — allegedly — doomed to repeat it. So, should those of us who loved our cassette mixtapes stay stupid and hope they come back in style?

CDs were once promoted as offering “Perfect Sound Forever.” But no one ever made that claim for cassettes. They couldn’t.

Play the same cassette tape in your car stereo all summer long and if the tape didn’t completely melt in the tape deck, it likely stretched and warped to the point where Robert Plant’s screeching falsetto sounded like Bart Simpson mumbling.

Yet, cassettes existed at the time because — get this — they were considered more convenient! Anyone who’s ever rewound or forwarded a tape continuously to get to the song they like knows just how “convenient” they were. Yet, despite their limitations, cassettes deserve to be remembered as “The Perfect Imperfect Format.” This was mostly because they allowed kids to make great mixtapes. For some, it was even considered a sacred, life-consuming mission to make that perfect mix.

photo: Washington Post

Bow Wow Wow even waxed poetic (no, that is not a vinyl reference) about mixtapes 35 summers ago, on their debut single and the world’s first-ever cassette single, 1980’s “C30 C60 C90 Go!” At the time, the new wave band’s record label, EMI, refused to promote the cassingle because it supposedly glorified home taping, which everyone thought would kill the music business. Those record executives had no idea what was about to come in the computer era.

Sure, you can make somebody a playlist today full of songs no one even owns and send a link to that special someone to check it out. Or if you’re into physical gifts, you can burn a CD of your favorite tracks that you do own and even decorate the jewel case all fancy. But there’s a reason why a C90 (that’s 90 minutes of recording time, a full 10 minutes more than a CD) was and is the way to go.

Or is it?

You see, computers caused a seismic shift in how mixes are made. No longer do you listen to a song and tape it, then hit the almighty “pause” button and pick the next song. No, obviously we scroll through our music library — or wander through a streaming service’s unfathomably large catalog — and click and drag the songs we want into a playlist and — WHAMMO! — we’re done.

But that’s too easy! The mix you make might be very good. But you won’t know it until you try it out. And then you most likely need to tinker with it, because the songs don’t flow the way you intended them to flow.

However, had you been listening all along and making your decisions based on what you were hearing, you would have had an 87 percent better chance* of making the perfect decision.

This might not seem like much, but there’s a reason why the radio crossfades songs into one another and why club DJs are paid extraordinary amounts of money to play music. It has something to do with how songs interact with one another.

Your computer or your phone actually limits you in terms of what can be programmed (if you have a record collection). Not every B-side ever recorded is available to you — unless you bother to transfer your vinyl LPs and 45s into MP3 files, an activity so tedious it makes mowing the lawn sound like a blast.

Cassettes made it easy to do silly things to your music on the spot. For example, I enjoyed editing out the curse words on my punk albums — poorly, I might add — in order to create the ridiculous notion that the FCC was monitoring my mixtapes and I needed the PG rating for wider distribution. These days, I’d have to either grab the “clean” version of a song or tinker in some advanced audio program where the edit would sound “professional.” That would severely miss the point.

But you know something else? The more I make this argument, the more ridiculous it seems. I mean, what next? You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced third-generation tape hiss?

No, unless everyone suddenly wakes up tomorrow and feels like hoarding cassettes and buying an old car with a cassette deck and then setting up a stereo system the old-fashioned way with a turntable, a CD player and two cassette decks, it’s just not likely “mixtapes” will make any sort of comeback, no matter how “cool” or “retro” they might be — although Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love Is a Mixtape, Butch Walker’s “Mixtape” single, and a new holiday called Cassette Store Day (back for its third year this October) all make a good case.

The only potential downside is you’ll never find a cassette in an old shoebox dated 30 years ago and discover what you were listening to at that time. I guess you should make a couple mix-CDs for this purpose. Or maybe it’s a better idea to keep moving forward.

Those curse words belonged in those songs and I had no right to remove them.

* All scientific data used in my study is made up.