Cassette Presentism

 I truly love the concept of Cassette Futurism, which is a scifi vibe that focuses on 70s/80s tech carried into the future, along with many of the aesthetics. The movie Alien is maybe the most known version, but it's gone into the present in little ways, with some tabletop roleplaying games I've seen and some other stuff--it was somewhat a trope in Alien: Earth this last year.

And now it's the future of say, when Alien was made (clearly, we're like 47 years later) and I'm buying cassette tapes.

It's a bit silly, because cassettes were always an odd thing. They dominated the market for a couple decades and then basically vanished. Mixtapes were wonderful, and the mix CD never was as good, while the playlist on the streaming service of your choice doesn't even come close. But that advantage aside, there's not much to recommend tapes. The sound quality is uncertain; they get tangled; rewinding is a guessing game and slow to boot.

So why am I going back to cassettes?

First, there was a guy I worked with at Powell's named Ryan who is temporally out of place; he has a dumb phone, he's ridden the rails, and (the key bit) he listens to cassettes. And when I saw him playing them at the counter, I remembered how much I enjoyed them, in the limited way I enjoyed paid music as a youth. When I took a trip to Europe in 1998, I was too alone and missed English and ended up buying a walkman (my first) and a bunch of tapes that I played over and over through the remaining weeks of the trip. Wham and Madonna featured strongly. A boy who maybe loved me and maybe I loved sent me a mixtape from home to meet me at Rome. I really liked that trip and those cassettes.

Second, I read an article about how cassettes require attention. Focus. In a way that streaming services--Spotify in my case--don't. That's...not exactly true to me? Maybe they even require less attention. They also reward patience and make your life better when you just ride along instead of considering "should I skip this song?" Because you can, of course, skip a song on a cassette, but it's a pain. And I want to have less digital in my life, and less skipping of things, less easiness when it comes to just deflecting anything that I don't at the exact moment want to deal with.

So I bought a little not-Walkman, and today I went out to Mississippi Records and bought a few cassettes from their in house line that are just fucking awesome. I know none of the songs--some of the artists, yes, but not the particular songs--but they're all great. There's little artifacts of the tapes being mixtapes, snippets of songs that they didn't mean to record, or moments of empty silence, or the hissing of a weird recording. I listened to two cassettes almost completely and there's a third for me to get excited for tomorrow. I love it.

It's maybe time to complicate your life, in ways that are nostalgic and pleasing. Think about what you might do in that regard.