This is what really killed the cassette tape: The presence of cassette players in modern cars is a mystery to me. No one uses cassettes anymore; you can’t even buy them. They never sounded that good to start with, but the real problem was that when the song was over you had to rewind it. I mean, there you are in your Mustang with that pretty girl you met at the party last week, parked in some romantic spot overlooking the lights of the town. You’ve got Barry White on, and he’s working his magic. There’s something neurological about Barry’s voice that resonates directly with the romance lobe in a girl’s brain. With the Mustang filled with Barry’s “White Gold”, you can almost see romantic notions spinning a whirling nimbus of light around her head. And then she does that thing girls do sometimes, she shifts a little in her seat, and her left shoulder touches your right shoulder and she leaves it there. This has approximately the same physiological effect on a young male as electrocution. In response, you slip your right hand down to the shift lever as if to check to make sure it hasn’t jumped out of Park all by itself, and then you put your hand on top of hers, resting on her thigh, your fingertips just bushing the paisley velour of her skirt. She half turns, smiles, and rests her beautiful blond head a little on your shoulder. You pretty much freeze at that point for fear that any motion at all, even breathing, will break the mood and spoil this moment that is so far beyond your wildest expectations for the evening that it makes you dizzy. She lets out a little sigh, and then the song ends. “Oh, that was nice,” she coos, “play it again”. Not wanting to break the tentative, enchanted contact with her, you awkwardly reach around the steering wheel with your left hand, grope for the rewind button and press it. Silence ensues, except for the whir of the rewind, spinning up faster and faster as the little sliver of tape is wound back up, whining up the scale as the ratio changes from take-up to supply reel. Seconds pass, then longer. She looks up at you in a funny way. You can feel the mood evaporating, like morning fog on a pond when the sun first hits it. The romantic nimbus fades, she lifts her head and rolls her left wrist a bit as if to look at her watch. Every young man with a Mustang knows that this is the kiss of death. “Gee, it’s getting late”, she says. Barry has abandoned you, still in whining rewind mode, the interior temperature in the car has dropped by 20 degrees, and she’s sitting up patting her hair. Before Barry is even queued up again, you’re starting the car and heading for her parent’s house, the fragile magic mood dispelled by blundering rewind. That’s what killed cassettes; not low dynamic range, neither wow nor flutter — it was the need to rewind Barry White that killed cassettes.
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:17:42 +0000
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