Cassette Tapes: Sucky music format, formidable iconography.
I’ve written quite a bit here about cassette tape worship. In the last decade, cassettes have gone from viable music formats to objects imbued with nostalgia. We melt them and extract their guts in the name of art; we wax poetic about them in books; we buckle our belts with them and honor them on t-shirts or in the form of jewelry. In this article, the NYT’s Rob Walker marvels at this shift.
Ten or twenty years ago, decorating clothing or countertops with nods to cassette tapes would’ve seemed totally bizarre-o. However, I don’t think it would’ve been weird to see wallpaper with a gramophone motif or a belt-buckle made to look like an LP. This begs the question: At one point will t-shirts across Williamsburg be emblazoned with artist renderings of iPads? And when will teenagers start wearing mini iPod classic charms on their necks?
Hmmm…
