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.

My friend Joe, a newspaper editor, once said something to the effect of “It’s kind of crazy how all the punks end up doing such interesting and serious work outside of punk when they ‘grow up.’” Okay, he probably said something a lot better and more impactful than that because I remember the gist of it years later. For some reason this brief conversation has stuck with me. As I moved through undergrad and grad school and into the professional world, I have consistently noticed the phenomenon in action. The best students, the best teachers, the best writers, and the best researchers all seem to have this common background. I have seen it and confirmed it in many of my (more interesting) colleagues and it shows in the work of many others whom I’ve never met. It’s a certain flair for innovation, improvisation, and investigation; a proclivity for self-education and DIY solutions; a disdain for convention and privilege; and an eye for finding humor and absurdity in unexpected places.

3 Chords is All You Need (… at Least to Start)

Yep. The Ramones first album proved among other things that you only need to know three guitar chords to make great music. But like many other punk bands, the music matured over time, becoming more complex as the artists began to hone their skills and increase their repertoire. Sometimes the music got better, sometimes it got worse as a result. Even though I never was able to master even the requisite three chords to start my own band, the “anyone can do this” attitude that punk embodied has carried over into everything I do. Most everything one might pursue has those metaphorical three chords — the trick, as with the guitar, is figuring out what they are.

In digital humanities, those three chords might be HTML, CSS, and PHP. (Maybe others have a different idea. I’m focusing here on the digital part because the humanities part – the content – is understood. Afterall, if you don’t have something to say, you shouldn’t be starting a “band.”) The degree to which you need these “chords” will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish, as well as on the tools you use and the people you work with. But generally speaking, these three will set you up to start web publishing, and also give you a solid base for understanding other more complex programming languages and projects.

So you find the chords, you master them. Then on to the next challenge… and the next. Before you know it, you’ll be soloing on your hand-built keytar as your self-produced album rockets to the top of the prog rock charts. Or not. Maybe you’ll just keep pounding away at those same chords and finding new ways to use them. But the point is that it’s alright to start small (and/or stay small).

DIY or Die!

It’s not just that you can do it yourself but that you should. To me, there is no such thing as a major label punk rock band (at least not after about 1980). Being punk has always been about doing it yourself – sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by preference, and occasionally as an anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian gesture. If you do it yourself, you are free to do it however you want.

Thus far, a lot of the digital humanities projects I’ve seen are tied to institutional funding and labor, proprietary content and technology, and bound by copyright and contractual obligations. It’s not that these projects are bad. Many are great. And they often benefit especially from connections gained through these affiliations. They also employ people, which is good. It’s just that they can also become organizationally bloated, unwieldy, and tenuous as a result. This doesn’t mean you have to run your semantic search think tank from your mom’s garage (though, hell, why not?), it just means keeping hierarchies in check and making sure you don’t lose control of your project, or lose sight of your goals. It also means learning as you go; tinkering, experimenting, and failing are all important.

No Rights Reserved

DIY is not about individualism, it can also be about leaning on (and contributing to) like-minded communities. Open source technologies and Creative Commons licenses are totally punk rock. Open platforms (like WordPress, Drupal, Omeka, etc.) and software packages (Gimp, OpenOffice, FireFox) share their code, encourage non-proprietary standards, and are often developed and maintained by a community of users/contributors. If you want to use them, you can do so for free. If you want to study them, make them better or bend them to your own needs, you can usually do that too. Most open source projects operate under some kind of Creative Commons license.

But open content is also important. Humanities research requires the use of all kinds of content. Running up against unnecessary copyright restrictions can be not only frustrating but can actually bring projects to a halt – especially digital archival projects operating under the aegis of larger institutions; institutions that are understandably (though sometimes paranoically) wary of litigation. There are two (or maybe three) significant archival repositories in my neighborhood. One opens its content to all comers because they have defined themselves as an institution committed to education and community. They allow hands-on access, digitization, and non-profit use of nearly everything in their collections. At the other end of the spectrum is the more hallowed institution. They believe that their collections are sacrosanct and that their artifacts exist to be preserved. They do not make anything available online and they forbid reproduction of any type (unless you pay a ridiculous fee) for fear that everyone is out to steal their content. They really believe that if they increase access, they will lose their standing. Direct quote: “These items are all we have! We can’t just let people download them! Then how will we make money or get funding?” As if they are bringing in a lot of money in their current state: offline, behind lock and key, and crippled by the analog DRM called fear of obsolecense. The people who will pay (i.e. commercial projects like documentaries), will pay anyway. If they can find your content. Overprotection creates a situation where the “wondrous” artifacts they preserve may as well have burned in Alexandria. It’s pretty annoying to know that the perfect set of historic image sits just across town, waiting to help you complete your groundbreaking, non-profit, community-based public history project, but it will cost you $1000 (or the equivalent in months of grovelling) to use it.

So why add to this problem with your own unnecessary copyright barriers? Open it up, and let people benefit from and build on your work. They’ll do it anyway, so what do you have to lose? (see also Stuart Geiger’s post on the topic). The point of your work is to make an impact (on communities, people, scholarship, your reputation, etc.). While nothing is more punk rock than throwing the ole’ “No Rights Reserved” on your blood, sweat and tears creation, CreativeCommons allows you to choose the degree of openness that suits your project, so no pressure… you poser.

Death to Posers and EduJocks

Punks hate nothing more than posers and jocks (and maybe Ronald Reagan). They are antithetical to all the punk believes in. Posers are an affront to the punk rocker’s unending need to measure and display authenticity. In edupunk and in the digital humanities (interesting how these seem to be tied together), there are also what might be called posers. We will call them EduJocks (I sure hope you heard it here first, but I doubt it). EduJocks adopt the outward persona of the digital humanist/edupunk, but lack the internalized commitment and understanding of the bigger picture. If you hear someone saying, “Well, BlackBoard is good for some things…” or “Too bad there’s no alternative to Microsoft Office/ContentDM/Adobe…”, cut them off and walk away immediately. You are in the presence of an EduJock. This could be like a Jeff Foxworthy bit. You know you’re an EduJock if… [ahem - this is what blog comments are for].

That’s it for Part 1. I’m getting tired of this right now, but I have plenty more to say. Stay tuned for Part 2, wherein I will blow your mind with another ludicrous application of the time-honored punk rock tradition of making everything you like be about punk rock.

Yes, this post ends abruptly. That’s because it’s punk rock. I’m exploring the form.