Jerry Kranitz
Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit
in the Pre-Internet Age
Publisher: Vinyl on Demand (2020)
320 pp.
Little attention has been paid to the origins of independent (i.e., primarily cassette tape) music since its first stirrings in the U.S. and elsewhere in the late 1970s. But it's a topic of vital importance, especially considering that so much of the terrain inhabited by today's independent musicians owes an incalculable debt to the pioneers of DIY music. This is heady pop culture stuff, and Jerry Kranitz takes it on with all the enthusiasm of a true believer and acolyte of the sacred cause. Written in an easily intelligible and fluid style that belies the complexity of the subject matter, Jerry's approach to the phenomenon of cassette culture is essentially exploratory, and his wonderfully detailed book is an attempt to understand its hazy origins, its contradictory motivations, and ultimately its historical trajectory from the rearview mirror of over 40 years. One of the persistent themes of the book is how DIY cassette-based music reshaped the cultural landscape of the corporate music industry before its current globalization in the wake of the internet and its current appropriation by multinational tech behemoths such as Amazon, Youtube, Spotify, and others. As a work of cultural history, Cassette Culture is a fascinating post-mortem of how independent artists drew upon materials at hand (inexpensive cassette tape, limited recording technology, primitive but innovative design techniques, shoestring budgets, and dodgy distribution networks) to forge a viable alternative industry for the production and dissemination of music that existed on the margins of society and eschewed conventional modes of manufacture and distribution. In a sense, Jerry's book both examines and celebrates Marx's prophetic vision that in a truly socialist future, shorn of the economic necessities of supply and demand and the market forces that drive unrestrained capitalism, the production of music (and all the arts, for that matter) would become ubiquitous among the masses. Instead of an elitist exercise in brute skill, pretentious showmanship, and cynical marketing savvy, music production and the expression of one's innermost drives and impulses would become available to anyone who had the inclination to realize his or her deepest aural fantasies. Jerry never questions the wisdom or desirability of the effects of such a revolution. Rather, he attempts to isolate a discrete moment in time and produce a more-or-less unified narrative of the tactical and logistical problems encountered by those who initiated this new revolt out of style, thereby declaring their independence from the ever tightening garotte of the commercial music industry. And he succeeds admirably in doing so. One of the deep ironies Jerry captures and focuses on from this now vanished flashpoint in time is that, in creating their own independent framework for the production and distribution of music, these early DIY artists discovered a sobering reality: that in order to maintain and flourish in any industry, whether on the margins of society or ensconced in its bureaucratic machinery, the creative aspirations of the artist will always be at odds with the economic necessities of the market of which he or she is a part. The alternatives were brutally simple: acquiescence or annihilation. As Jerry repeatedly points out in the pages of Cassette Culture, this persistent either-or dilemma was simply unavoidable. A grudging surrender to the implacable forces of supply-and-demand economics was, ultimately, preferable to the harsh silence of total anonymity. And yet, as the numerous interviews, commentaries, photographs and illustrations in the book demonstrate, it was a compromise worth making, for in the end the DIY approach restored to music a freshness, a vitality, and an excitement that decades of gross pandering and economic piracy had eroded. Artistic integrity is a very fine thing, but so too is eating. It was, as Bill Nelson once sang, "a fair exchange." As if Jerry's thoughtfully detailed text is not enough to admire, a 2-CD aural overview that documents this watershed moment in the history of twentieth century popular music is also provided, featuring tracks by R. Stevie Moore, Autopsia, Muslimgauze, and a host of other DIY artists who valiantly fought a battle royale against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a decadent and vainglorious empire. Did they win? In a way, they did, as the endless amateur music videos on Youtube can attest to. But let's not forget that to call one an "amateur," as Maya Deren pointed out so long ago in her defense of independent filmmakers, does not mean to suggest one is an inferior artist, but only that what they do is done for the love of the thing and not economic gain. Cassette Culture shares in this love and is itself both a love letter to the amateur DIY prophets and a hymn of praise to their victory.
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