Cassette Week, But Only In My Socials

Hey folks. So, our #PantsTheme for this week is cassettes. “Cassette Week” is an actual thing that cassette labels celebrate in October every year, but this week is Cassette Week in Pants land.

If you’re Gen X like me, it’s pretty much guaranteed that audio cassettes were a part of your life at some point. Early millennials, too. They were the most common audio format in car stereos when we were young (aside from terrestrial radio), and they were (for some of us) the first format we owned music on. Many of us started with vinyl, too, but tapes were easier to transport and simpler to operate. Put tape in player, press button.

I have a pretty romanticized relationship with cassettes in general, since I owned so many of them. I owned more albums on tape than anyone I knew. But it doesn’t stop there. No, no. Cassette was the first format that offered the option of making your OWN tapes of whatever you wanted and taking them with you. This gave rise to what is now commonly referred to as the “mixtape” (this term exists in a couple of contexts now, including, of course, the tapes that circulated in hip-hop circles made by DJs or MCs or both that weren’t official label releases). “Mixtape” in this context refers to a tape that someone made with different songs by different artists, sometimes in a particular order, for personal enjoyment (or sometimes as a gift to someone else). This is what many of us miss the most… Yes, playlists are fine, but they don’t have the same tactile aspect, nor do they require the time that had to be put in to make a mixtape. And MANY of us had at least one mixtape we received from someone else that was important to us, either because of who made it, or the music it contained, or both.

Of course, I can’t really talk about cassettes without discussing the fact that the format has returned to a degree. Many people don’t care, and that’s fine. But many younger folks are picking up on some of the things that we all liked about the format in the first place. I have a particular fondness for avant garde/experimental music that is released on cassette…that’s what most of the tapes I’ve bought in recent years consist of.

Are you of the age group that enjoyed cassettes the first time around? Or are you someone who has picked up on them recently during the format’s revival?