High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape
Marc Masters
Oct 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Paul Brion
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7 hr 22 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. This entertaining book charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom-to create, to invent, to connect. Marc Masters introduces listeners to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.
About the author
Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared on NPR and in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Bandcamp Daily. He is author of No Wave.
Paul Brion has a passion for storytelling. He believes that audiobooks-our most current form of the oral tradition-are the purest of the interactive and co-creative arts. An autodidact with eclectic interests, he enjoys learning about a wide variety of subjects, as he has an avaricious hunger for knowledge.
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