Synopsis
Cassette inventor Lou Ottens digs through his past to figure out why the audiotape won't die. Rock veterans join a legion of young bands releasing music on tape to push Lou along on his journey to remember.
Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape
2016 Directed by Seth Smoot, Zack Taylor
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☆"Normally I’m more interested in the future than in the past."☆
Kickstarter-funded in all the good and bad ways a documentary can be, Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape is underwhelming if informative, providing not exactly a history of the titular musical medium but an examination of the man who invented them and a look at the recent resurgence in their use among some genres of music.
Being born in 1983 and not old enough to appreciate music until the 90s, I don't have the love and affinity for audio cassettes like those of a generation before me. (Nonetheless, the best radio station on Sirius/XM is Classic Rewind, "the cassette tape era of rock and roll.") So it's not a surprise that…
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I can't believe that one of the guys that created the cassette tape isn't nostalgic about tapes or anything, all he cares about is the future, and that's ok but dang. Coming across this documentary is ironic because just 2 days ago I bought Def Leppard Hysteria cassette tape on eBay.
I remember recording the weekly top 40 with Casey Kasem on the weekends. I'm still a proud owner of cassette tapes and I also have a reel to reel.
FYI: Def Leppard is my favorite band.
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I think there’ll always be some demand for cassettes and physical media in general. There’s a certain vulnerability in sharing a physical mixtape with someone as opposed to sharing a playlist. You had to pick out those songs, queue them up, and play them through just right so it’d all line up perfectly on the tape. On top of that, they’d take hours to make, so there was a level of dedication involved that I find fascinating. Kinda makes me sad that one of the inventors of the cassette didn’t share the same nostalgia for it. ☹️
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Cassette, on its international quest to explore the cassette tape - and above all, the mix tape - its origins, its influences, its demise and its resurgence, absolutely has its heart in the right place. It manages to interview all the surviving inventors, it has the obligatory talking heads of Henry Rollins and Thurston Moore, not to mention live footage of presumably grateful Williamsburg hipster bands.
The problem is almost paradoxical: Cassette documents a great many people with a huge passion for the subject matter; something that does not appear to be particularly shared by the filmmakers, themselves. The film is consistently permeated by a largely impassive atmosphere which one can only assume is the reason behind its general lack…
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Watched on Amazon Prime.
A look back at the concept, history and contemporary use of the audio cassette featuring the original (German?) inventor, and various musicians / nerds who are still using a pencil to spool the tape back in.
Having lived through the whole tape thing back in the 80s/early 90s, I do have a certain sense of nostalgia about the humble music cassette. After all, I spent years plodding round my various paper rounds plugged into a Walkman. I still have most of my old cassettes in a box in the garage somewhere. However, I certainly don't miss them in any way, but I do see the appeal of the warm fuzzy sound and the tactile physical object.…
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The fact that they showed Lou Ottens an episode of Kids React pretty much sums up how shallow this documentary is, on top of all the excessive nostalgia waxing.
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I love the subject matter, but we needed a bit more of a clear forward narrative instead of endless loops of "aren't cassettes great?"
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Okay doc, but halfway through I had to get up and flip it over, kind of inconvenient if you ask me
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I was born in 1973.
This is all very relatable to me.
Very, very relatable.
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