The Offline Report

Lou Ottens, the inventor of the cassette tape, has passed away at the age of 94. pic.twitter.com/6Ff1aGRV6z — Lord Arse! 🕹️ (@Lord_Arse) March 10, 2021 From newsletters and conversations on social media, people express affection for his invention. Rusty Foster, author of "Today in Tabs" newsletter wrote : Today in Unmoored Nostalgia: I miss mixtapes, the click and hiss, the awkward uneven silences between songs, the word “dub.” The inventor of the cassette tape, Lou Ottens, just died. Playlists aren’t the same, you can’t hear the hands of the person who made a playlist carefully stitching it together. Playlists are fungible, mixtapes weren’t. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Mozart's parents lived to see him succeed as a musician. So did Michael Jackson's parents, and Prince's parents and Joni Mitchell's parents. You can make it in the music industry without dead parents. But... But ... particularly if your mother dies or abandons you or is sent away when you're young, like: Johann Sebastian Bach , whose mother died in 1694 when he was 9 years old and father died in 1695 when Bach was 10 : "He [Bach] lost his parents at the age of ten. And I think that drama, that shattering experience, formed his outlook on the world for the rest of his life. He felt abandoned. He felt the world would be a deceitful, untrustworthy place. This worked very well with his religious understanding as a Lutheren where the same attitue towards the world was preached. "In many ways what he was going to do with his music was to create his own world, his own better world, the perfect world. In a sense he himself was going to become a creator."...

A comment on Beastie Boys' Cookie Puss video : ...it was 1991's ruling on the Biz Markie case: Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.. It wasn't so much that (c) laws changed, but rather our laws were CLARIFIED to account for sampling. Prior (70's & 80's) the laws addressed licensing, yet this new 'sampling' was unclear. Many (c) owners looked the other way because litigation is expensive - however, by late 80s, hip-hop records w/ samples were beginning to sell and chart, thus, enter the lawsuit as damages won could pay for all the attorney fees... ---------------------- Further Reading: "The digital music revolution took off when artists started converting their records from analog to digital form to make use of this new innovation."    homerecordingpro.com/history-recorded-music This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Songwriters through the 1990s would lay down tracks and lyrics onto cassettes, and toss them in their bag, often without the case. (Screenshot from Season 2, Episode 1 "Mike Judge's 'Tales From the Tour Bus'" now streaming from Cinemax.) George Clinton fetches then-unreleased Parliament hit song "Flash Light" from his bag in an animated re-enactment from the show mentioned above. Unverified accounts estimate producer and lead singer Clinton stacked 50 vocals for the song's chorus. As recently as the publishing date of this blog post, no mass-market medium matches that of the cassette. Garageband only runs on Apple products. And these "people also searched for" results from google show people are looking for something, anything to record on: This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Nothing solidifies a new friendship like a thoughtfully assembled playlist, loaded for posterity to a physical object, retrievable from a keepsake box. No internetting required. Paper surface area displays an item's passive advertisement. Insert J-cards for cassette tapes and CDs can be customized with pens stickers, imagination and inspiration. Spotting a cassette or CD or vinyl case from across the room sparks a mood to play its content . But the case-free cassette far surpasses the naked CD in terms of customization possibility. And without a popular media form so easily altered *and finalized* at the lay level as the cassette, how is today's music culture nurturing and nudging budding sound artists? Is it our imagination - or was the cassette age more conducive to homemade experimentation than peak CD? This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .