Tape Heads

Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture
Edited by Thurston Moore

Rizzoli Books, $23

Among the many beloved institutions the advent of digital, downloadable music has been accused of destroying—stores, Lars Ulrich's popularity, the entire music industry—less documented, if no less lamented, is the homemade analog cassette mix tape. Sonic Youth frontman/aesthete Thurston Moore rounds up a wide array of musicians, artists and hipsters to wax rhapsodic about the greatest cassettes they ever created or received, be they tools of seduction, sources of artistic inspiration or crudely assembled artifacts from a misspent youth.

Much like a mix tape itself, the quick-hit essays included here are something of a hodgepodge. Filmmaker Alison Anders and Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 and Luna champion at length the cassette as an integral part of their most significant relationships as well as their creative processes, while designer Kate Spade's testimony is all of one sentence. Mac McCaughan of Superchunk and Moore himself reconnect with the underground hardcore punk that made them want to form bands to begin with, while Mike Watt shows off a gift tape from the Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd betraying a common love of Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman." But what keeps the book from devolving into a tedious nostalgia trip are the visuals-most entries are accompanied by the actual covers of the tapes discussed, and it's in the attention (or lack thereof) to the homemade artwork and hand-scrawled song listings that the book's central conceit becomes most evident: Rather than merely serve as a makeshift collection of music committed to cheap magnetic tape, the cassettes themselves were often pieces of legitimate artwork, tactile and meaningful, offering a personal touch that no iTunes playlist could ever provide.