Of all the drab, dreary, dirty and dusty Middle-Eastern
towns I have found myself in over the past months, few are as drab, dreary,
dirty or dusty as Sharjah.
I was told that in the past Sharjah was a hotbed of vice,
drunkenness and debauchery, but it managed to bankrupt itself and sought help
from the government of Saudi Arabia.
They promised to bail it out on condition that Sharjah imposed strict
Islamic values on its residents and rid its streets of all unsavoury
activities. Perhaps that explains the
lifelessness I see all around me, and with its crumbling buildings,
disintegrating roads, its collapsing pavements, grimy shop-windows effectively
masking faded displays of age-old products, and its general air of neglect, it
seems like life stagnated sometime in the mid-70s since when nothing has
changed.
That sense of stepping back into time was dramatically
reinforced when, walking across a downtown sandy waste ground littered with randomly
parked cars shimmering in the blazing sun (mix the inability of Middle Eastern
drivers to think and drive simultaneously, the impossibility of marking white
lines on sand and the enchanting Islamic habit of driving to within 100 meters
of a mosque and then simply abandoning the car, and you have the utter chaos
which is an Arab car park) I stumbled across this –
The sheer ubiquitousness of the cassette throughout the
1970s and 1980s makes those of us who lived then forget that it is no
more. In the year that Sony eventually
stopped making its Walkman and that manufacturing of blank tapes seems to be
solely in the hands of two factories in China, its almost total demise has
passed almost unnoticed.
It has certainly passed unlamented. It was, after all, a pretty horrible medium. Beyond its passion for unravelling itself
(leading to such extremes of frustration that normally law-abiding motorists would
angrily rip them from the machine and toss them out the car window to despoil the
passing countryside) it reproduced sound with an insistent hiss and a lack of
charm which is matched today only by the town of Sharjah. You could never find what you wanted on it,
and the quicker the fast-forward mechanism ran, the more likely it was that the
tape would get chewed up in the machine.
On top of that, its plastic packaging was even more prone to immediate
disintegration than a CD jewel case. I
hated it, as did everyone else I knew.
Yet I had hundreds. When we moved
from KL to Singapore, I decided eventually to discard all but a handful of my
cassette collection and was astonished by what I had amassed. There was a stunning version of The Planets from an Australian orchestra
(which one, I forget), an off-radio Gothic
Symphony from the Albert Hall, every single broadcast of Choral Evensong
transmitted by the BBC from 1970 to 1975 (Including a classic with George
Thalben-Ball in imperious charge at the Temple church) and a wonderful dramatisation
of the life of Percy Grainger taken off a radio broadcast sometime in the early
1980s.
Cassette aficionados will quickly recognise that the vast
majority of those in my collection were actually recordings I had made from
radio broadcasts (not really illegal, since they were only ever for my private
listening). I could never take the
concept of a pre-recorded cassette seriously; did anyone really accept that
hollow, hissing sound in preference to the rich and warm tone of an LP, scratches
and all? And that, for me, was what the
cassette was - a convenient method of recording things for my personal pleasure.
For most people, its real popularity lay in its wonderful
portability and ability to be listened to (although God only knows why) whilst
jogging or involved in some other vaguely ridiculous physical exertion, without
the music jumping around or being distorted in some other way. In that area it could never hope to compete
with a pre-loaded iPod. Certainly, in
terms of reproduction quality, it never ever held a match to either LP or CD,
no matter how much Chrome, Silver or Gold was added. So its fate was pretty well sealed once the 21st
century dawned. My last cassette deck ground to a halt a
decade ago and it’s almost that long since I last sat in a car – once the
cassette’s greatest ally – which had a cassette player attached to its
dashboard. To all intents and purposes
it has passed from my knowledge.
Yet, wandering through the bazaars and souks of Dubai I
found a plethora of shops selling not just piles of 60, 90 or 120 minute blank
cassettes along with cassette head cleaners and other assorted cassette-related
paraphernalia, but the hardware as well.
Close to where the dhows come in and off-load their mind-boggling array
of smuggled goods from across the Persian Gulf, just about every shop sold
cassette players, recorders and walkmen all still in the shrink-wrap that was
applied when they left the factory in Iran or wherever it is that so many Sony,
Panasonic, LG and Akai badges are attached to locally-made electronics. I was sorely tempted to buy one; I even got into
a half-hearted haggle over prices with a man selling a Sony double cassette deck
which, he assured me, was fresh from the factory in Japan.
But then I remembered Sharjah! Did I really want to take myself back to the
drab, dreary, dull and dusty atmosphere of the 1970s? Nostalgia is one thing, pointless backwardism
is another.
Hi Marc. A strange coincidence that you should write about cassettes and cassette recorders (and to that medium you can add their predecessor, the reel-to-reel tape recorder). I'll explain more when we meet. From my experience, pre-recorded cassettes were, by and large, dreadful, but recording onto a high quality blank cassette (yes, they did exist) using a similarly high quality recorder with Dolby produced more than acceptable results. I for one do mourn their passing as there is no other medium that I know of that allows for easy, portable personal recording. If you do, please let me know!! See you soon! Peter
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely piece of walking down memory lane. I have mixed feelings of the MC (Music-cassette). It was my first medium for buying classical recordings, simply because they were easily copied and therefore pirated. In those 1970s years, there were many shops on Orchard Road that sold pirated classical recordings (Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Philips, CBS Masterworks, you name it) at $2 a piece, and that's how my first collection began.
ReplyDeleteHowever, within a few months and years, tape squeak came on and invariably obliterated everything you heard. Original tapes (which cost 8 times as much) were not immune. Then there were other problems: the contact head of the player becoming coated with copper dust, mould growing on the tape surface and the unusual phenomenon of hearing a faint echo of music on the other side of the tape been played backwards. I much preferred the LP (they're still in my collection while the tapes are mostly gone), but thank God for the Compact Disc!