Not everyone loves Apple. In fact a lot of people loathe the company for reasons both compelling and idiotic. But mention of Apple almost invariably elicits an unusually strong reaction one way or the other. This in itself explains why so much is written about Apple in the media. People who love the company will read along to bask in the glory and possibility of a new earth-shattering way to give up their money and ignore/transcend their immediate surroundings; people who hate the company will follow along so they know what to rail against, to identify that which threatens their values or worldview, and to plan ahead for a day when a more suitable, somehow less evil global corporation can provide them with a reasonable copy. In between the extremes, plenty of intelligent and rational people find other reasons to follow Apple’s every move. Educators and policy-makers, journalists and media companies, graphic/web/industrial/fashion designers, software developers, artists, authors and musicians, activists and advocates, enterprise IT managers and small business owners alike; all have something at stake because they all accept the premise that Apple is leading the way forward (not to assign a moral or prognostic value to that particular direction).

It’s a rare day when I pick up a publication of one sort or another and don’t read (or page past) an article about Apple. Whether it’s The Chronicle of Higher Education or various ed tech blogs, all of whom seem to vacillate between staid ambivalence and unquestioning optimism about how the iPod/iPhone/iPad/apps will transform education ©; or open culture activists (not to mention content industry lobbyists) lamenting that Apple’s way of doing business is a leading threat to personal (or capital) liberties; or newspaper pundits and pop philosophers opining the decline of attention, of deep knowledge, and the art of face-to-face conversation. These are all fascinating – and often important – discussions. They are discussions that rightly revolve around Apple because Apple is the company that created the new markets in which we participate, they invented the new gadgets that we (literally and metaphorically) dissect and study, they unwittingly crafted the cultural and economic forces that, for better or worse, have shaped the first decades of the 21st century.

So it is no surprise that Apple has become a lens through which we look at other issues — issues that are much older than Apple; issues that are endemic in and emblematic of global capitalism as it has evolved over time. Exploiting 3rd world labor rates in China and elsewhere is not “an Apple problem.” I mean, if the whole Mike Daisy debacle reminds me of anything, it’s “The Jungle” a century later, done totally wrong. The identification and use of corporate tax loopholes is not one of the shiny new things Apple invented. Maintaining ridiculous cash reserves and high profit margins is not exactly unheard of in late capitalism. Manipulating strategic supply chains to your advantage is hardly frowned upon by the sorts of people who consume mainstream business news, let alone the sort who own the media corporations that publish that news. And how many companies are held responsible for the source of their electricity? And yet much of the coverage would have us believe that these are stories that can only be told about Apple. They surely do often include caveats that admit the misdirect at play, but those caveats don’t cancel out the headlines or the public perception. For one, it’s because the headlines draw in the readers, they sell copy, they increase click-through, ad revenue, etc. Lots of Apple fans have pointed to this problem in the company’s defense.

But I see no reason to defend Apple; they neither need nor deserve my defense. I’m not worried so much about Apple’s reputation as I am about the general idea that one can somehow avoid contributing to the problem by buying some non-Apple alternative. Remember that one Bruce Springsteen song about all the well-paid American union workers making Zunes and Android tablets? Yeah, me neither. The truth is, at least as far as I can tell, Apple is no better or worse (ethically/morally) than other hardware companies when it comes to putting their own self-interests before those of the labor and environmental resources they use to build their product. This is what corporations do. It’s what they are legally-mandated to do. It is tempting to say that exposing Apple is important to making the larger cases; that it will open the public’s eyes to unfair labor practices, monopolistic behavior, environmental degradation, and so on, but I just don’t think that’s what is actually happening.

I think that there is some larger impulse at play that keeps these stories coming. Something that makes people read them when they wouldn’t read a comparable story about, say, General Electric, Kraft Foods, Comcast, or Wells-Fargo. I think the public is shocked and moved and drawn in by stories about Apple because they genuinely see the company as a force for, if not good per se, then at least progress of some sort. Apple represents our clean, polished, perfect future — in our heart, we want this to be true, even if all the facts reveal that Apple is also at least equal parts our filthy, dangerous, exploiting, industrial past.

In light of the truth, journalists write the Apple exposé stories as a sort of apologia for their embarrassing adoration. We read them for the same reasons.

Yes, I know it’s 2010 (pronounced “twenty-ten”), and I know that nostalgia for the analog age is a 30-something cliche, and I know the cassette has become a sickening node of ironic culture.  But for just a few minutes, I ask you to set aside your pernicious Family Guy-inspired liking for hackneyed 80s references to consider the cassette as it should be understood: as a lost assertion of our basic rights, a technological and social artifact,  and a symbol of friendship, grassroots culture and low-fi audiophilia.
I’m not really going to get deep into the history of the cassette but I think it’s worth noting that tapes “changed everything” as they say.  Music became smaller, more portable, cheaper (actually, freer), more contentious, more ubiquitous, and both more and less intimate.

When considering cassette media, we need to ponder the hardware that was used to play it.  The cassette gave us The Walkman and the “boombox” – two devices that couldn’t be more different.  One, the Walkman, was meant to shut out the world, to bring the music closer, to retire into the imagination and the inner world of musical sensation.  The other, the boombox, or “ghetto blaster”, was meant to bring imagination and musical sensation into the outer world.  The Walkman is an extension of the teenage bedroom, domain of the vinyl LP.  The boombox is an extension of the club, the car, the party, and perhaps the penis – a manifestation of action, performance, and bravado.  Think Radio Raheem when you think boombox.  Whatever you do, do NOT think Lloyd Dobbler, that sappy new romantic who reappropriated his boombox as a two-way Walkman. The boombox was urban, evolving into the “system” – the window-rattling audio menaces one might encounter when stopping your car next to a ’91 Civic with gold spinner rims.  The Walkman was suburban, evolving into the iPod – a tiny, consumer-fetishized personal technological wonder.  Culturally, I think these two very conflicting devices actually worked in tandem to create an atmosphere in which divisions of youth (and sub/counter) culture  became more distinct, more visible, more confrontational and also more accessible – a commodity-identity that could be easily recognized and digested and therefore easily bought and sold.

Still, the cassette was a continuation, as were its followers.  Like a vinyl album, it retained the “flipside.”  This was an essential component of musical media that was not removed until the birth of the CD,  a small (i.e. cassette-like?) disc (i.e. album-like?) media which was capable of high fidelity sound (i.e. album-like?).  The displacement of the CD by the mp3 removed the physicality of all prior formats but combined the reproducibility, portability, and low-fi impermanence of the cassette with the single serving goodness of the 7″ vinyl single/EP.  It was not until fairly recently that mp3 recordings began to match the high fidelity of CDs and vinyl LPs, and even still the mp3 is most often consumed one song at a time (rather than by the album).  The introduction of both the cassette and the mp3 format launched the recording industry into a hissyfit panic that some people might copy content instead of buying it, and both technologies came along right at a time when mainstream record labels were putting out the kind of banal garbage that helped make that true.

But even though the early mp3 resembled earlier formats in some senses, in others it was music/youth culture’s waterloo – the end of an era in which music was an all-powerful, awe-inspiring, cultural force; a refuge that was both in plain sight and deeply underground; equally technical and nebulous.  It signaled the beginning of a new era where music became a capitalist accessory, a component of yet more shallow spectacle, an economic asset used primarily to sell physical and sensory widgets.  Sure, we can look back to the late 1960s and see similarities in the commodification of hippy/beat culture, but nobody was using The Velvet Underground to sell car tires, mainly because ad execs (not to mention the general public) didn’t know who the VU were. (Yes, that linked ad is from 1993 – roughly “the year punk broke” to name another watershed moment – yet it still illustrates the music as advertising appliance approach that has become even more common since the late nineties/early aughts.)  Now, anyone with an internet connection can find, read about, and download that Moss Icon EP I searched for across several months within a matter of seconds.  When a thing becomes too easily accessible, it loses its value.  If diamonds grew on trees, nobody would be interested, except for their industrial value.

Which brings me back to the point of this little rant.  I am deeply sad, forlorn even, that music is meaning less to me these days.  Perhaps it is age, but I think it has even more to do with the ritual, culture, and physicality of the cassette, as contrasted with modern equivalents, which are far more casual, and it is on that theme that I shall continue to opine without further asides.

The mixtape, an icon of 80s and 90s culture, was (and is for some purists still) a deep symbol of friendship and even love, representing a ridiculously large commitment of time and energy.  I have given and received mixtapes that went through so may edits and overdubs that in the quiet between songs you could hear layer upon layer of other songs, some that didn’t fit the mix, some that made the cut but were moved elsewhere in the order, and others that were simply taped over for lack of a new and truly blank cassette.  Labels and covers were almost always handmade, with evidence of their own revision and improvisation.  I once received a mixtape recorded over a factory-issue Best of Chicago album that belonged to my friend’s father.  She just popped the overwrite-protection tab and taped right over “Saturday in the Park”, confirming that all was well in the world.  Unlike the burned CD, a sterile object of disinvestment only Stanley Kubrick could love, a great mixtape was a palimpsest of aural, cultural and emotional information.

Although the dubbed cassette was not as personalized as the mixtape, it could still be deeply personal.  The dubbed cassette was the lo-fi copy you got from your friend who had an album you didn’t own yet, or maybe had never even heard of before. My first dub was Appetite for Destruction (side A) and Eazy Duz It (side B).  The height of my dubbing excess came about a decade later, when I spent roughly a week digging through a new friend’s collection of obscure oi!, streetpunk, and viking rock, dubbing each album and transcribing the songs onto little pieces of notebook paper that I folded into the tape cases to serve as makeshift liner notes.  I honestly cannot imagine listening to any of that music on any other physical format and even though I would have loved to find my own original copies of some of that stuff (for bragging rights), part of me was always okay with just having the scammed copy.  A few years ago, my tape deck (a wood paneled top loader with 4 level sliders on the top) broke for the last time.  I put those tapes, and dozens more, out on the street in my densely populated urban neighborhood, hoping someone would find and cherish them.  Without my noticing, it rained heavily that day, soaking the box, the labels, and the covers.  Nobody, save for the garbage man, ever came for them.  A shameful moment indeed, but instructive.  The dubbed cassette was both a second class citizen and an object of desire and affection, the Sally Hemmings of your record collection.  It represented the inferior but also the exotic.  It was special and prized but also kept to the side,  segregated from your more conventionally desirable items, except for those moments when you were alone, when you traveled, or when you wanted to impress your savvier friends with your more obscure tastes.  In the end, unceremoniously abandoned.

I could go on some more about the importance of the cassette to DIY and punk culture, but I’ll leave that alone.  I could also talk about taping crappy pop songs off the radio so I could lip sync to them in my childhood living room, or how I once faced two single-deck boomboxes at each other in order to make a copy of Licensed to Ill, but I don’t want to spread the schlock too thick here.  Instead of grasping at the sky in agony over my lost passion for music, I’ve decided to reinvest myself in vinyl and try to set aside times to just listen to music – not on my phone, not while I’m walking down the street or in the elevator, but listening to music while I’m… listening to music (okay, I might read a magazine, but an analog one for sure).

As Steve Albini put it back in the day, “The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.”

Note: I “dubbed” the above image from the Internet and photoshopped in what may well be the real title of a real tape I may or may not have made for or received from a friend circa 1989.