Today we present a cassette theory mixtape. Three excellent scholars help us understand consumer-focused magnetic tape and its history as a medium for the masses:

Eleanor Patterson, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn, whose new book just won the 2025 Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Book Award and a 2025 International Association for Media and History Book Award. It’s called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television distribution (Illinois Press, 2024).

Rob Drew, Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University and a fantastic interpreter of pop culture like graffiti and karaoke. His new book is Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke, 2024).

Andrew Simon, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. We’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while about his 2022 book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press).

This conversation winds its way from the early days of radio, through the Anglophone indie rock of the 1980s, and into the streets of Cairo, where cassette tapes represented the first mass medium that Egyptian state power could not control.

03:49 Introducing the Cassette Theory Mixtape

04:06 Meet the Scholars: Eleanor Patterson, Rob S. Drew, and Andrew Simon

06:10 Diving into the Books: A Round Table Discussion

12:24 Exploring the Prehistory of Media Distribution

23:43 The Role of Cassettes in Indie and Hip Hop Culture

31:12 Cassettes in Egypt: A Tool for Revolution and Resistance

40:32 The Intersection of Media and Culture

Hear the full 90 minute conversation by joining our Patreon! Please support the show at patreon.com/phantompower

Links to Mack’s recent travels:

Residual Noise Festival at Brown University

Resonance: Sound Across the Disciplines at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis

Transcript

Andrew Simon: [00:00:00] Cassette tapes and players did not simply join other mass mediums like records and radio. They became the media of the masses. Cassettes in many ways were the internet before the internet. They enabled anyone to produce culture, circulate information, challenge ruling regimes, long before social media ever entered all of our daily lives.

PPIntro: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound where I talk to people who make sound and people who study sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I’m a Media professor at Miami University, and I just want to start off by giving a quick shout out to a couple of creative communities that I got to hang out in.

I [00:01:00] just got back from the Residual Noise Festival at Brown University, which was this amazing three day event featuring ambisonic sound, art, and music pieces performed both at Brown and at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design. The lead curator of the festival was Ed Osborne, who is the chair of the Art Department at Brown, and a very accomplished sound artist.

And in the middle of the festival there was this one day conference and Ed was kind enough to invite me to be the keynote speaker. And then I had an onstage discussion with Emily I. Dolan, the chair of Brown’s Music Department, and someone whose work I’ve followed for a long time, and it was a real thrill to meet her as well.

But really the biggest thrill of all was the sounds, I mean, three days of these immersive ambisonic creations by amazing artists in these amazing facilities, both at Brown and RISD [00:02:00] and most importantly, there is just such a creative and fun and diverse and nurturing community of composers and sound artists at these two schools.

I’ll put a link to the festival in the show notes and hopefully. We may also feature some of these artists in coming episodes. And then the week before that I visited the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, and they’ve been having this two year long sound seminar chaired by Professors Carter Mathes and Xiaojue Wong.

And they invited me to come over and talk to their faculty and grad students and postdocs about my work. And I got to learn about all the fascinating sound related stuff that’s happening over there at Rutgers. That was also a blast. So I just want to thank Carter and Xiaojue and Ed for the invitations and thank all of you for listening because so many people at these events came up to me and said how valuable they [00:03:00] found this podcast.

And I never anticipated making so many new friends and working relationships through this show. So I feel super fortunate. And that also reminds me, last episode I mentioned trying to get our Patreon sponsorships up so that I can pay an editor and keep this show going during the summer. And we got an unprecedented upsurge in memberships.

So thank you so much. We still kind of have quite a ways to go for me to reach the break even point on production costs. So please, if you’ve been thinking about doing it, maybe do it now. Just go to patreon.com/phantompower you’ll get all the bonus content from today’s show and all the previous shows.

Speaking of today’s show, let me talk about it. I am calling this a cassette theory mixtape. We have three excellent scholars who have recently published books that help [00:04:00] us understand the medium of magnetic tape and it’s history as a medium for the masses. My guests are Eleanor Patterson, associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn, whose new book just won the 2025 Broadcast Education Association’s book Award and the 2025 International Association for Media and History Book Award. It’s called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution Out on Illinois Press.

We also have Rob S. Drew, professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University.

Rob is a fantastic interpreter of pop culture. He’s done work on graffiti and karaoke, and his new book is called Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable out on Duke University Press.

And we also have Andrew Simon, senior lecturer in Middle Eastern [00:05:00] Studies at Dartmouth College, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while about his book, which came out back in 2022. It’s called Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt on Stanford University Press. These three books encounter their subject matter in different historical moments and geographies, and I thought it would be really exciting to sort of bring these great scholars together to discuss the cassette tapes, many purposes and meanings in everyday life.

I should say that Eleanor’s book is not exactly about the cassette tape, but she gives us this really amazing prehistory that I think is very helpful in thinking about the cassette tape. This is also the first time that I’ve had three guests on at once to just sort of have a round table discussion.

So let me know what you think about this format. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s so hard to get people’s schedules together and I managed to pull it off this time. So, let me know what you think. [00:06:00] Alright, so Cassette Theory: A Mix Tape. Let’s do it.

Nora. Rob, Andrew, welcome to the show.

Rob Drew: Thank you.

Andrew Simon: Thank you.

Mack Hagood: I am really excited to have all of you with me, I thought maybe we could just start off with each one of you doing a bit of a self introduction and giving us sort of the short elevator pitch of your book before we really dive in, sort of set the stage for us.

And Nora, why don’t we start off with you.

Eleanor Patterson: Alright, well thanks for asking. My book is called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution. It’s really a case study look at, on demand listening and viewing and really peer-to-peer file sharing before the Internet with looking at analog technologies, kind of at the birth of broadcasting and radio through the seventies and eighties.

And [00:07:00] think that these are stories about the histories of the audience, of fans and the labor they do in distributing content. I’m really a distribution scholar more than anything else, so I’m thinking about how programs get to people and, in what ways they encounter and how those technological, social assemblages shape, how we make sense of content, but also form relationships and make sense of ourselves. And at a few different case studies. Bootlegging is a really hard thing to study, so, won’t say my book is comprehensive, but I look at communities of radio and television fandoms that were, connecting with each other, doing home recording and sharing content really at a time where the only other way to listen or encounter programs was to tune in on a schedule determined by the industry.

That’s [00:08:00] the very small version of my book. So I’ll stop there and let the others have a chance. So I’m really excited to hear about the other books we’re talking about.

Mack Hagood: Great. Yeah. Rob, why don’t you go next?

Rob Drew: Okay. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Mack. And it’s a pleasure to be here with y’all. I started this book as a book about mixtapes way back when, ages ago, back in the nineties when people were making a lot of mix tapes, I started finally getting to interview people when I finished my karaoke book.

My previous book was about karaoke in the 2000s, and by that time, people weren’t really making tapes anymore. They were making CDs, but I was interviewing people on my campus. They kept referring to them as mixed tapes and kept talking about how much they missed tape, even young people.

So I thought, well, I have to look into this, into the history of it, and ended up going kind of down the rabbit hole of [00:09:00] cassette history, which became a history of the cassette, especially from the perspective of both distribution and redistribution. Nora refers to herself as a scholar of distribution.

I think I’ve become that myself. And the cassette is both a very practical format for people to cheaply and easily share their own and others’ music. And as what became a symbolic format for a lot of people, a format that carried a lot of resonance as something that symbolized community, symbolized DIY resourcefulness.

And the book kind of turns on that moment in the early eighties when both the feds are going after the cassette to some degree talking about imposing royalties because of home taping. At the same time. There are a lot of independent artists and [00:10:00] small artists who are picking up on four track recorders and putting out their own tapes and advertising them via, through small zines and such.

So it’s, it doesn’t claim to be a comprehensive history of the cassette, but sort of as a distribution format for independent music.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and it’s a moment, very near and dear to my heart ’cause I lived it.

Rob Drew: Me too.

Mack Hagood: It’s pretty cool. Okay, Andrew.

Andrew Simon: Thank you so much for the invitation, Mack to be on the podcast. We actually read your book Hush earlier this term, for a sound studies group at Dartmouth College,

Mack Hagood: Nice!

Andrew Simon: A pleasure to be here with you and Nora and Rob today. So the inspiration for my book Media The Masses is the Arab Spring. I was living in downtown Cairo in the days leading up to Hosni Mubarak’s downfall, this event that many people build as a Facebook revolution. And

That motivated me to look into media, sound not only, in terms of what I was [00:11:00] witnessing around me, but the history of it. In the case of Egypt, in grad school, I started writing papers on particular artists and musical genres, and I came to realize the thing connecting all of these topics were cassette tapes. I set out then to write a history of the cassette that became a history of modern Egypt. And something that I seek to show in the book is that cassette tapes and players did not simply join other mass mediums like records and radio. They became the media of the masses. Cassettes in many ways were the internet before the internet. They enabled anyone to produce culture, circulate information, challenge ruling regimes, long before social media ever entered all of our daily lives. That’s the story that I strive to tell in this project.

Mack Hagood: Fantastic. Alright, that’s really helpful. And, I thought maybe what I should do is zoom in on some pieces that I found [00:12:00] interesting about each of your books. All of you just feel free to jump in if that strikes, if you hear something that resonates with something from your own research or if you have a question. So a little bit more one by one. And then I have a bunch of questions that I want to ask the whole group because I saw a lot of resonances between these three books, which I’ve very much enjoyed reading. Nora, I thought I would start with you because you do give us this really fascinating prehistory of not only file sharing, but it’s really even a prehistory of cassette circulation, right?

Like you start way back. And so I’m very interested in why you did this. I’m really grateful you did, because it actually, for my own research, I found this helpful because you seem to find out a lot about control, that people were looking for a [00:13:00] sense of control in this sort of progressive era, the Victorian era transitioning into this more modern era. People are starting to like the phonograph and the telephone, but. feel like they lack a sense of control over these things. And so I, was wondering if you could talk more about control and what you call preservation culture, and just this moment of progressive era and the prehistory of cassette tape

Eleanor Patterson: Yeah, sure. You know, it’s funny because you called this cassette jam and I was thinking like, well, I don’t really talk about cassettes.

Mack Hagood: No, you don’t. But it, but I think it’s so relevant.

Eleanor Patterson: Actually cassettes do play a big part in this, and they come up at interesting times. But, I am a nerd, I guess. I don’t know. I’m a big fan of Lisa Gillman and Jonathan Stern and ideas that formations don’t come [00:14:00] out of the void right? if you think of tape trading as like a social practice, it doesn’t just occur like it comes from somewhere.

And so I was thinking about writing a genealogy of tape trading, which is, my book is essentially mostly about tape trading. I also look at communal practices of viewing in places where bootlegging really was more limited and it wasn’t a one-to-one practice.

But I think the reason I dive back to the progressive era,most medias cultural historians, we know that, the post-industrial revolution, that time period in the late 1800s is where we see those roots of mass culture. I was wanting to think about home recording, because Rob kind of talked about distribution, and redistribution and, I think if you’re redistributing content, so let’s say recordings, you’re also reproducing it too. [00:15:00]

I’m a big fan of a research method I call stumble upon.

Mack Hagood: Hmm.

Eleanor Patterson: Where this project started when I stumbled upon these, classic radio fans. I tuned into a radio show where they were playing some really old episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar from the late 50s, early 60s.

I was like, why are people still listening to this? Where do these recordings come from? And it turned out that the local broadcaster at a public radio station told me most of the stuff he got was from fans who would give it to him or send it to him. These recordings of old radio shows. And I can’t think about that without thinking about home recording because come, their genesis is either airchecks. Off the air or through trading and reproducing them in their home through home recording technologies and then sharing with each other. So redistributing and [00:16:00] the history of home recording goes back to Edison and the phonograph and the late 1800s. And the ways that we already were accustomed to having those technologies in our home, that market didn’t exist.

It was made through advertisements and a lot of them marketed the phonograph as a technology that you could play with, that you could use to entertain yourself by making your own home recordings. And it’s at the same time that home movie cameras are being marketed by Kodak. And it’s just that as I was letting the archives lead me towards the research, it really became clear to me that this is a moment where the home becomes redefined through these new technologies and control over them be the ability to play back the recordings you’re making or the recordings of music that you’re buying. And that music is not the only type of home recording or not the only type of content being marketed for the home, some of the first, [00:17:00] examples of home entertainment were being used by companies like Edison in the late 1800s. And, so that’s where I wanted to really start because that’s the technological apparatus that radio becomes introduced to.

So people are already accustomed to now having Vaudeville recordings in their home or speeches or music they get to select when and where they listen to that. So it’s not a surprise that the earliest radio recordings are actually pre cassette tape, using these little home recording machines made by…

You’d have pre grooved, lacquered discs that you can make your own home recordings. And the earliest examples I’ve found discussions of are like Amos and Andy recordings on these little pre grooved discs…. that’s where I always,

Mack Hagood: And fits in with a longer history of people being exposed to new kinds of media. And it seems at the time, like a sort of [00:18:00] overwhelming flood. And you don’t know how to manage it all. You don’t know what to do with it. Going back to the newspaper era, I think, Mark Twain made a lot of his money off of selling scrapbooks to put newspaper clippings in or he had a special kind of scrapbook. You could restick the newspaper clipping without ruining the clipping or something. My former colleague…

Eleanor Patterson: I was gonna say Katie Day Good, right.

Mack Hagood: Katie Day Good you know, did a great history of this called “From Scrapbook to Facebook”, where she’s making a somewhat similar move to what you do in your book, Nora, which is like looking at these parallels asking like, what is the desire here?

And one of the points that you make is that it’s a lot about capturing ephemerality, like the ability to record sound gives us a way to suddenly cling onto something that always just evaporated in thin air. And when you have that ability on the phonograph, but then when you’re on the telephone [00:19:00] or the radio and you don’t have that ability, you feel like something’s missing.

I can’t keep this conversation going. I can’t keep this great Amos and Andy show, or, what have you. So this is, I think you used the term like preservation culture for this kind of desire, or

Eleanor Patterson: I might’ve been citing somebody else.

Mack Hagood: Okay, that’s fine.

Eleanor Patterson: There’s a great book about preservation cultures and, because this is also the same moment that our government is going out in the field to record the indigenous, tribes. And so it’s this impulse of preservation.

But I build on that because I think part of that effective relationship to ephemeral content during this moment of modernity is a desire to grasp on. And I think scrapbooks are one of those, grassroots ways of managing ephemerality. This is also a moment where you start [00:20:00] having, Baudelaire talks about street artists trying to capture fleeting moments. And I think sound recording is a big part of that. a desire to capture and store. I think radio producers didn’t understand this from the industry for a very long time. How we as listeners have an effective relationship to the entertainment that we engage with and how it’s comforting and how we wanna control and listen to it again. These are storage mediums and people are using it to capture these moments so they can relive them and replay content. Radio programs are coming into the home.

There’s a difference, I think, too in that intimacy. Listening to Amos and Andy, it’s, vaudeville but it’s not because it’s in your house and they’re addressing you. Within that broader context of having home entertainment. But also they’re alive and you’re hearing a desire to capture and be able [00:21:00] to store that and bring that and replay it on demand whenever you want to, because you would be having your radio alongside your phonograph player too.

That’s the way that these technologies were being made, made sense in the home, as connected to each other. And in 1929, I think you have the first radio console that is directly hooked up to a phonograph player too, and RCA buys Victor. and so it’s a story of industry as well, right?

Like the market adjusting and understanding, Yeah. audience engagement to a certain extent.

Mack Hagood: I want to move on to ask Rob a question, but you have this one image that, I think really encapsulates this desire and it’s way back in 1877, an image from Punches Almanac, and, put a picture of it on the screen, for those who are watching the YouTube version, but it’s like this couple [00:22:00] in this wine cellar and there are all these bottles and the concept seems to be that telephone conversations or the telephone sound, whatever that means, has somehow been bottled in these wine bottles.

And now they can, or I guess it’s classical music that has somehow been bottled. Now people can bring these things out of the wine cellar to their dinner party and play like the, I dunno, like some opera or something.

Eleanor Patterson: I love that cartoon and I kind of stumbled upon it. Like I was like, I guess I’m going back to the 1877 you guys. Giddy up.

This was just after some of the first discussions and demos of the Talking Machine. It wasn’t really released at that point. Edison is not thinking about music. But this artist, and I think he was in Britain. He immediately becomes taken up in popular culture as this possibility of, and I [00:23:00] think the telephone is just the word that’s being used for electronic wires, this mode that you could have a wire from the concert hall and, and record it through that technology and bottle it up and their visual of, record storage medium is like a beer barrel or a wine barrel. And it’s like you uncork it for the pleasure of entertainment and so this idea that you would stored…

Mack Hagood: Not far from the cassette tape

Eleanor Patterson: Yeah. Right. Well, these are all storage mediums and I liked that because you can see it’s already in the Victorian imagery, of the popular uses of this technology beyond like Dictaphone or, you know, business uses.

Mack Hagood: Rob, one of the things that I took from your book is that you’re really paying attention to the way, and that this is, gets back to themes that we would see in Lisa Gitelman, but that in different contexts. the cassette has different properties and meanings, [00:24:00] like the assemblage around technology is different, and you’re really focused on this particular moment that you, in a very scholarly way, call anglophone post-punk indie rock, which appreciate specificity

there. you talk about how the cassette was an important medium of distribution for this kind of music, or at least was perceived to but also that cassette became sort of a totem itself and had this really deep cultural,

Rob Drew: Yeah.

Mack Hagood: So can maybe start with what was this scene and why the cassette.

Rob Drew: Well, there were a number of zines in the early eighties, most notably OP magazine out of Olympia, Washington that started to run these columns devoted to independent cassettes. And as soon as they’re announced, they’re flooded with independent cassettes. And that wasn’t the only [00:25:00] one. There were quite a few zines around the country that are running, columns devoted to indie cassettes.

And, those vary in their genre, in the type of music, that they include. But, indie post-punk really looms large and picks up on it. Very heavily, I think partly because, as you say, those values independence obviously, and of community outside the music industry and alongside the music industry by that moment in the early eighties, really loomed large within this culture.

And, the cassettes played into that very nicely. it had its moments sort of then, there were certainly other musicians who recorded two cassettes prior to post punk indie rock. But, the cassette as a format and post punk indie rock as a kind structure of [00:26:00] feeling, or, a way of approaching music, making it really, dovetailed quite nicely.

Just the idea of music making as not something necessarily done for profit, but something done as a sort of gift to fellow musicians and to fans as a part of a community. I like to think of it as a kind of erotic assemblage where people come together, musicians coming together with a common sense of the cassette as something that really goes beyond, This is at the very same moment when, of course, independent vinyl labels are coming to the fore, SST and, a lot of others, alternative tentacles up in San Francisco.

And they have this idea too, that we’re gonna, we’re gonna get outside the music industry. We’re just going to do it ourselves. But of course, you still [00:27:00] need to get to a pressing plan for that, and you still need to, go through that common channel of vinyl.

The idea of having a format outside of vinyl that they could latch onto, was something that I think really appealed to a lot of artists and kind of played into, again, the idea of independence. It, did vinyl One better

Mack Hagood: You said that you really started off this project because you were thinking about mix tapes, I was so glad to see that you did this because even though you’re focused on indie music, you sort of do this comparative study of the discourse of the mix tape within indie culture and within hop culture where it had a different kind of meaning. Can you talk about why you took that approach and like what you’d learned about that kind of comparison?

Rob Drew: My emphasis was on independent music culture and the [00:28:00] kind of mix tape that at least I was used to making, which was. Just a sort of concatenation of songs at home on your stereo,

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Rob Drew: Switching between vinyl records and that sort of thing. Now, mixtape took on a whole alternative, meaning within hip hop culture, Hip hop DJs actually mixed together music and it grew out of, first of all, the cassette was central to hip hop. From its very beginnings. For the first five, six years of hip hop, there were no vinyl records. It was a live form. It was a performance form of course, and started in the South Bronx and was distributed to the degree that it was distributed, all in recorded form.

It was recorded, distributed, informally by way of cassettes, by the artists [00:29:00] involved, the DJs involved, or fans of theirs. And, the first. Hip hop vinyl record famously was rapper’s Delight, which didn’t even come out of the hip hop culture of the South Bronx. It was made in New Jersey by Sugar Hill records.

So, slowly but surely within ensuing. Decade or so between the late seventies and the late eighties. DJs primarily, not so much MCs, but DJs spearhead the idea of recording onto cassette, sometimes at their club dates, sometimes at home, and distributing these, sometimes on the street, just selling them off the street, in the park or sometimes, bringing them to mom and pop stores.

A lot of this is going on in New York, of course, at first, and eventually there are even small companies devoted to it, although it’s of course very [00:30:00] much under the radar. ’cause this is all extra legal. These are rerecording of existing songs that are being mixed together without copyright clearance.

So that was the world of hip hop. Whereas, You know what I call the indie mixtape. I think it’s a little more general than that, but, mix taping as a lot of us knew, it was something that, the idea of putting a bunch of songs together on a tape in order to give to somebody who loved somebody who had a crush on, or just a friend to impress them with your taste.

Just one after another, the song. So that’s what I primarily concentrate on as a format that represents love rather than theft. You know, that was the big transition I saw for the cassette in the early eighties from a symbol of theft to a symbol of love.

Mack Hagood: Because the industry portrayed it as this outlaw medium, and it [00:31:00] became this kind of sentimental medium for people. I like that argument and it certainly is true for me. Andrew, told us today that you were really inspired to do this project, or at least to start thinking about sound in Egypt because of your experience, during the Arab Spring. I’m sort of curious about hearing more about the sounds of that revolution, but also I think it’s pretty appropriate that’s the case because there’s this real tension in your book between the sort of power of the state and the masses, even at the level of technology.

Right? Where, for example, you say that we can’t really understand the role of the cassette in Egypt if we don’t understand the role of radio in Egypt, which was a state run medium. So maybe, I kind of asked two questions there to take it where you will.

Andrew Simon: Sure. There’s a lot of [00:32:00] residences too with both of these other projects. In the case of the Revolution, I mean, something I was doing, an intensive Arabic fellowship that was based in downtown Cairo at the American University in Cairo’s old campus, right on the border of Tevar Square, which became the center of the Revolution. And so I ended up missing a lot of class. And when I was at those protests, I mean, a number of things piqued my curiosity. So artists who had passed away decades ago were revived and their songs more. We had individuals who were not well known whatsoever. They rise as new artists. And the course of the revolution, there were chants that rhymed poetry was being performed in the square. And all of these different things really piqued my curiosity in, sound and its…

Mack Hagood: Hmm,

Andrew Simon: And then based on those first 10 experiences too, going back to my apartment, turning on state controlled Egyptian television and seeing [00:33:00] them screening a documentary about penguins rather than the protests that we’re calling for the fall of an authoritarian regime.

This disconnect between those respective stories and narratives. And so when I set out to explore cassettes, then this notion of control was central to that project because here we have this question of who has the right to contribute to culture, who shapes what culture assumes? And the case of Egypt, mass culture that Nora mentioned, it wasn’t just an abstract idea, it was a state engineered program. Where they would send out officials into the countryside in Egypt and stage things like Shakespearean plays to try to elevate and educate the masses. Radio in Egypt that you mentioned, Mack had been state controlled since 1934. There were multiple screening committees on the radio, there was a text assembly, a listening [00:34:00] assembly.

If you passed exams that you would have to perform in person for both of those committees, individual stations, then it was at their discretion of whether or not they would even broadcast your song. So radio was seen as a school for the masses. It popularized a very small pool of elite performers. then come to represent this immense source of anxiety. I was coming across these articles in the popular Egyptian press declaring war on the cassette. We had these critics saying, cassettes pose a greater danger than cocaine to citizens. Because with

Anyone has the potential to be a cultural producer rather than a cultural consumer. That’s, it’s not something that’s seen as emancipatory or in a good way on the part of cultural gatekeepers. It’s of immense anxiety. And so that question of control [00:35:00] is something that I try to explore in the book, which also to Rob’s comment, it takes the shape of a mix tape, the book itself.

So each chapter revolves around a particular idea from things like consumption, the law and taste to circulation history and archives. And then Nora’s remark about the stumble upon methodology. That was really central to my work, because the Egyptian National Archives ended in 1952. So if you want to tell a story of anything in Egypt after 1952, you don’t have access to any documents in the National Archives, then it becomes this question of how do you write the history of a nation without its national archives? Well, you go into the street, you go to paper markets, you go to private collections, you conduct oral interviews, you come across these cassette recordings in antique shops.

I found photographs in garbage bags that once belonged in family albums that I had to piece back together again.

Mack Hagood: [00:36:00] Wow.

Andrew Simon: I introduced this notion of a shadow archive. Everything that exists in the shadow of the inaccessible Egyptian National Archives, how does that enable us to tell stories about the past? And then this just one of those stories in this project.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and I really appreciate it in your book, how Rob, you did this as well, had a sort of a section of the book that was about methodology the photos and the garbage rags is already very intriguing to me. and just thinking about what you said about the cassette tape being more dangerous than cocaine. I don’t know if this is real, but somebody sent me this text or, is a social media post, allegedly from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that says if it crosses the US border illegally, it’s our job to stop it.

And then in the background it says, people, money, ideas which I’m like, [00:37:00] wait a minute. I know if that’s really an ice.gov, post or not, but at the present moment I tend to believe it is. So yeah, that, that tension between the state and the masses when it comes to the media. one thing that really made me chuckle on that theme was when I was reading your book, I was thinking about Charles Hirsch’s book, the Ethical Soundscape, which looked at Islamic cassette sermons in Egypt, and the way that they sort of workers, like taxi drivers kind of create a contemplative and ethical space in their day-to-day life. And then I laughed out loud when I read your study of what you called the vulgar soundscape that cassettes created in Egypt. So it’s like a very opposite case. Can you maybe talk about this, moral panic around vulgar music on cassettes in Egypt?

Andrew Simon: Sure. Thank you. And Charles’ book is the inspiration [00:38:00] actually for that title. When people think of the Middle East, they tend to think of one of two things. So it’s Charles Hirsch’s The Ethical Soundscape book, or it’s the 1979 Iranian Revolution and his use of that medium of messages. And so when I was reading Charles’ book, which I greatly enjoyed. One of the impressions that study could lend with its focus on Islamic cassette sermons is that Egyptians are just listening to Islamic sermons all the time. But the same people that listen to Islamic sermons also listen to Michael Jackson, also girls listen to popular Egyptian artists. wanted to show them the complexity and the breadth of that soundscape. And then also to bit on the association with cassettes and the Iranian revolution.

When people talk about the seventies and eighties and the nineties in Egypt, there’s an [00:39:00] overwhelming focus on religion. is this period of the Islamic revival as how it’s characterized.

There’s momentous events. like the 1967 war, the 1973 war, and then there’s this concentration on authoritarianism. I wanted to pivot all of those. So in the story that I wrote, I tried to shift the focus from the religious to the profane, from the momentous to the mundane, from the consolidation of power to its contestation cassettes, enabling us to do that. moral panic is something that was so enjoyable to read about and explore as

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Andrew Simon: Because there’s a whole genre, for instance, of music called Rag Nap Music that became very popular after the Arab Spring. A number of Ana artists now, their songs are the top trending songs globally, yet alone in the Middle East. people talk about that genre, they [00:40:00] use phrases like, the contamination of public taste. The corruption of morals, the pollution of Egypt’s soundscape. And something that I came to see in the course of my work is that none of those accusations are new. The same things were said about Shabi or this other genre of popular music going back to the seventies.

And a history that I try to share, through the prism of cassette tapes in this book.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So maybe now we can just talk a little bit about some of these themes that are running through, I think, two or in some cases, all three books. I mean, one thing I certainly notice is this desire to produce this kind of counter history that you just mentioned, sort of people’s history, if you will. is there something about the cassette, that sort of lends itself to this, that it, becomes an object or, you know, Nora, in [00:41:00] your case, I mean, you’re talking about video cassettes and you’re also talking about people using open reel I suppose. So maybe we’re getting a little bit beyond the cassette, but, something about home taping or, the practices that people do with this, that help give us a different view on media industries.

Eleanor Patterson: I think it’s very easy to be very utopian about home recording but I do think that you kind of shift from one gatekeeper to another a little bit if you’re not, you’re, you, you are able to, I do think that cassette or Rio to reel or VHS like home recording us a power to everyday individuals to a certain extent, right? But I think we trade in that instance, like when we talk about radio those like what we think of as the industrial players within radio, you know, like network and sponsor local affiliates. You’re kind of trading off those for newer, for different companies [00:42:00] like Sony or Phillips. Right. because they’re making the hardware that facilitates home recording and there is a cost and an expense that is a privilege to be able to do home recording at a certain level. I mean, I think it is more democratic in many ways. The population I was looking at, especially with radio in the fifties and sixties, even into the seventies and eighties radio. Collectors were audio files as well. And so that’s maybe a distinction of case study.

But reel to reel tape was perceived as a higher quality, as a better fit. If you’re recording off air, you can record a longer amount of time because cassette tapes are limited. And I’m sure this comes into play with mixed tapes or home recordings that are being made to spread information.

I find that fascinating. ’cause I was thinking as Andrew was talking, like, I wonder what the differences are. Because, like Rob, a lot of my, [00:43:00] historiography was bound to fanzines and newsletters. And as Andrew was talking, he’s like, I wonder about the difference between. Cassette tapes, as facilitating like a social network and communication in a grassroots, informal way. and how, that maybe is distinct or connected to print. Print, like everything I looked at in my research, a lot of it was hand in hand. When I start looking at these communities of people sharing content, they’re kind of making their own bicycle network and they connect through newsletters.

Mack Hagood: No, it’s perfect. Because I too was like, I was super excited to learn that the old time radio nerds had zines. Like, I was like, whoa, this wasn’t just an indie rock thing, this goes back before that. So it was interesting to hear about a different subculture that was into that.

And then I was thinking about these relationships between different media and the [00:44:00] fact that cassette tapes couldn’t circulate themselves. Right. You needed this assistance from the zine in order to do it. And then that made me wonder, Andrew, in the Egyptian context, was there also some kind of zine equivalent going on that helped people know what tapes to get?

Or was it more, an oral culture where there were these tape stands and you were more like going on foot or driving to somewhere learning about tapes that way?

Andrew Simon: Sure. I think cassettes surfaced in a number of different places, so some of them would appear at sidewalk kiosks. We had state controlled recording labels that had stores that also sold cassettes. But I think something even returning to earlier question as well people’s history, placing those two things into conversation is that one of the artists I look at was challenging the stories told by Egypt’s ruling regimes, things like when Richard Nixon comes to Cairo during the throes of Watergate in the summer of [00:45:00] 74, and the Egyptian government him with open arms, rolls out a little red carpet for him. This singer, his name is Sheik, I’m writing a biography of him now, completely the script on that story entirely. Refers to Nixon as a groom, that one married as a last resort, spits on him audibly. And recordings of that song that’s called Shababa Nixon, or Welcome Father Nixon to Egypt.

That song circulates on non-commercial cassettes. so it’s not released by any label. It’s not found in any kiosk, it’s not available in any store. People would go to protests where he performed the song, record him, or in informal house parties, in people’s living rooms, record a cassette, copy the cassette. So here we had an artist that was encouraging piracy. That’s how they circulated. He said, my media is the masses. So we

[00:46:00] that are dependent upon that hand-to-hand circulation of those state controlled. Channels. And that is just kind of one glimpse into this more, bottom up people’s story of this technology where if we were just listening to something like the radio, we wouldn’t even know Shik existed. He’s through this medium and an exploration of it.

Mack Hagood: I was amazed by that story and, we’re definitely gonna play a little clip of that so we can get a sense of what that song sounds like.

هذا موسيقى

Mack Hagood: Rob, is this, bringing up anything for you as well?

Rob Drew: I just keep thinking about it. I think this started with the [00:47:00] idea of the cassette as a people’s format or something like that, like an outsider. But I’m really struck by the contrast between our work in terms of the work the cassette is doing and the sort of. Communities it’s advocating for, at least in our accounts.

I kept thinking first with Andrews, whose book I love, and, talking about the cassette as cassette artists, as sort of low culture and kind of this almost Soviet style system of this paternalistic old, cultural, like you say, Shakespeare in the park or Shakespeare in the, and now we have these folk artists who are, condemned as low culture and as profane.

The word you kept using was vulgar. I don’t think that the artists who I talk about mostly. Cassettes are mostly viewed by anybody within the mainstream as [00:48:00] vulgar. I think they’re just ignored mostly. You know, they’re so, they’re such outsiders. And you know, when people like Beck or people like Liz Fair or whoever start to pick up on cassettes and use it as a sort of stepping stones for vinyl releases, that’s a different matter.

Those are legitimate artists. But most cassette artists who, again, are advertising in these fanzines and selling a few copies for the price of a blank tape are just so outside the mainstream that nobody even bothers to condemn them. And so that was one contrast. And then with Nora’s book, I kept thinking, the trading, the tape trading. So the closest analog I think of that I did not discuss at all, but sometimes wish I had and would love to get to research about it, I’ve thought about is, grateful dead culture, the tape trading and the preserving the ephemera. Like you say, that whole, that [00:49:00] fascinating beginning you have of recording media themselves back to Edison originating not for this idea of spreading new music, but preserving existing utterances and preserving existing music and preserving performances.

So that’s not really the two things I’m talking about on one hand, artists who. Can’t get a hearing, otherwise recording onto a few cassettes and then sending them out by mail as a result of these zine ads, that’s, those are original recordings and then mix tapes are hand, are one to one expressions for the purposes, as I say, of either courting or showing off or things like that, or just creating connections.

Neither of them are really in the spirit of a trading network like you have this network. Frankly, I hope you don’t mind my using the term kind of nerdy, network traders of [00:50:00] wrestling videos and things like that is so, the long story short, the differences between our projects and the differences between the communities involved really interested me as much as the similarities, even though we’re kind of all, concentrating on some form of outsider culture.

Mack Hagood: And I should say, you know, one really amazing thing about Nora’s book is there are some very fine photographs of professional wrestlers with just admirable amounts of chest hair. Like, it’s really impressive. I just think, you know, that’s just another reason to get the book.

Eleanor Patterson: Gonna fly off the shelf, now.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Anything I could do to help. It’s not only an award-winning book, it’s also just got hot wrestling action.

Eleanor Patterson: [00:51:00] I really wanted that photo in there.

Mack Hagood: And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Eleanor Patterson, Rob Drew, and Andrew Simon. The conversation keeps going in the Patreon version. It really gets kind of fun because they start asking each other questions and then, we really get into a freewheeling conversation. So if you want to hear that, just join the Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower.

And while I’m thanking people, I wanna say big thanks to Nisso Sacha, who has been doing editing work on this show for the past two years, and Katelyn Phan who has been doing all the backstage stuff, including transcripts and uploading the show to servers and whatnot, I really couldn’t have done it without them.

They have been fantastic to work with over the past two years. Just the best students you could ask for and doing really professional work. [00:52:00] And, I just wanna say thanks to them as the School year winds down. Our theme music is by Alex Blue, who I recently got to hang out with on Zoom. Great to see you, Alex.

And, that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. I’ll see you next time.

The post Cassette Theory: A Mixtape (Eleanor Patterson, Rob Drew, and Andrew Simon) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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