Overview

Cassette Culture: Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit in the Pre-Internet Age takes a social history/analytical approach to the growth of the global homemade music/cassette culture network that sprouted and flourished from the post-punk era through the early 1990s. Jerry Kranitz explores how the participants communicated, traded, collaborated, and set up cottage industry labels to distribute their work. A long overdue study of this pivotal yet less than comprehensively documented chapter in the post-punk and 20th century independent arts movement stories.

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Reviews

In Cassette Culture, Jerry Kranitz has achieved the near impossible, that of summing up the nature, reach and impact of the radical and democratizing technology that was the cassette tape. The invention of the compact cassette wrestled control out of the hands of the record industry and placed it firmly into the laps of you and I, to create, communicate, collaborate and innovate like never before. Drawing on original sources and prime movers in the underground cassette scenes that sprang up all over, Kranitz paints an evocative picture of an era now passed, but whose influence is still with us. The humble cassette offered true emancipation to those seeking to share and exchange music with others across the world and enabled small bands to record and release their own music without the need to go into a studio or chase a recording contract. Kranitz opens the door to this world through the eyes of some of its key protagonists and brings it alive for us through his clear passion for the topic. Cassette Culture acts as an eye-opening introduction, a selection box, and a guidebook into the incredible world of the underground cassette revolution, from which once experienced, there is no going back. Alan Rider, Outsideleft Magazine/Adventures in Reality This book evokes the almost-clandestine networks, the home-dubbed love and revolution that snailed its way through the mail, a thing that didn't need permission, a thing that thrived precisely because it was excluded. It was raw, unruly, and totally outside of the algorithm's grasp. It was rough, slow and amateur, but it built real connections across borders and physical isolation. This is how we misfits found each other, making noise outside of commerce. A countercultural web stuck together with trust, photocopies and international reply coupons. Nigel Ayers, Nocturnal Emissions The humble cassette has received quite a lot of interest of late with a number of books exploring its social and cultural significance across a range of genres, but Jerry Kranitz's book remains one of the few publications to focus on the cassette's significance as a means of DIY music production and distribution. Starting firstly in the heady days of late 1970s post-punk and then outlining the cassette's role in the 1980s and 90s in the development of an alternative network of hometapers. Out of print since its initial hardback publication on Vinyl-on-Demand, this new and updated version is therefore very much appreciated. Philip Sanderson, founder of Snatch Tapes

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