John Thill

So let us reflect.  In 2007 I pretty much listened to tapes or nothing and if I may be perfectly honest it was because everything was so unstable.  I could listen to them in my broken car stereo, in the $10 dollar boom box I bought at a thrift store in Winston-Salem, in my living room, if my nudist roommate wasn’t around.  I sold off my nice stereo speakers to move back to California in a rush when my marriage and my lease ended in Raleigh.  I dubbed all kinds of tapes for the car using the cheap boombox and then I went out for a walk by the lake whenever dusk came to watch the fireflies. 

I’d heard everything in the car twice by the time I got to Kansas, but I swear my mind had been altered into a believer in the format.  I love that it is hard to tell where you are in the progress of a cassette, you just have to sit back and let it happen to you.  And I had to do that with other things too.

I never bothered to acquire new speakers to plug in to the TEAC CD player I had or to find any permanent solution to where exactly the record player fits in the mess that is my room, but the shitty boombox missing the rewind button is there front and center.

Much of underground music has been stewing its own filth for a while, while I feel like here in Los Angeles there is momentum toward interesting new music, the dominant underground music press whether it be Pitchfork or Foxy Digitalis lauds the obviously recycled or the needlessly obscure.  Obscurity is in the internet age, so why not be brash and bold?

And where do tapes fit in with this, they seem to be liked because they are a medium of obscurity.  They were intended to be some kind of anachronistic jab at the mass culture.   But look around radio hip hop is far more interesting than most of the crap of the “best of” lists by underground trendmakers.

But on the contrary, tapes are enjoyed also because they are cheap.  They are absolutely a part of mass culture past, so why pretend that they are an obscure medium.  They aren’t any more obscure in their nature than an mp3 or a compact disc.  You can buy that one Better Than Ezra record or indulge in the history of euro-trance for a quarter.  I love this aspect.  You can try something totally beyond your safety zone, pop despite the claims is a multifaceted beast.

John Thill
851 Scripps Dr.
Claremont, CA 91711