Archive for publications, 2024

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[Commlist] New book: Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable

Thu May 30 15:50:33 GMT 2024





We would like to announce a new publication from Duke University Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Unspooled***

How the Cassette Made Music Shareable

*Rob Drew***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478025597/unspooled <https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781478025597/unspooled>_*

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*Receive a 20% discount online*:**LLS24*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31^st December 2024. Discount only applies to the CAP website.

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“/Rob Drew is one of my favorite writers on music, and I wish more people knew about his work. This is the definitive cultural history of indie music’s tangled but fascinating love affair with the audiocassette.”/––David Hesmondhalgh, author of /Why Music Matters/

"/The story of the cassette tape Drew and Masters tell is compelling: how a lo-fi, accident- and deterioration-prone, and more-or-less parasitic audio technology not only achieved market dominance but captured a permanent place in the imaginations and practices of music-makers, labels, distributors, and fans the world over.  Unspooled and High Bias show readers that the peculiar technology of the cassette tape exemplifies the inherent contradictions of popular music perhaps better than any other medium./" ––David Pike, /Popmatters/

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting.

*Rob Drew*is Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University and author of /Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody.///



*Duke University Press **| Sign, Storage, Transmission | March 2024 | 232pp | 9781478025597 | PB | £22.99**

*Price subject to change.

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