Unspooled

Deep into the new millennium, the cassette tape keeps making a comeback. Independent labels in hipster circles still release tapes, and its outline turns up on T-shirts, mugs, belt buckles, and phone cases. Rob Drew's Unspooled follows the format from its origins in office dictation machines and inexpensive portable players to its later reputation as a personal way of sharing music and a marker of cultural standing.

Drew draws on sources that range from obscure music zines to transcripts of congressional hearings. He examines the early 1980s, when music industry representatives claimed the cassette encouraged piracy, and shows how indie rock culture adopted the tape as a symbol of its identity as an outsider community.

The indie scene's attachment to the cassette peaked with the mixtape, which reinforced the idea of indie as a community that gave its music away rather than selling it. Tracing the tape's history, Drew shows how trading cassettes became an accepted and meaningful form of communication, and how it gave rise to rituals of making independent recordings, re-recording them, and passing them along as gifts.