Cassette Theory: A Mixtape (Eleanor Patterson, Rob Drew, and Andrew Simon)

Today we present a cassette theory mixtape. Three excellent scholars help us understand consumer-focused magnetic tape and its history as a medium for the masses: Eleanor Patterson, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Auburn, whose new book just won the 2025 Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Book Award and a 2025 International Association for Media and History Book Award. It’s called Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television distribution (Illinois Press, 2024).  Rob Drew, Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University and a fantastic interpreter of pop culture like graffiti and karaoke. His new book is Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke, 2024).  Andrew Simon, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. We’ve been wanting to talk to him for a while about his 2022 book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press).  This conversation winds its way from the early days of radio, through the Anglophone indie rock of the 1980s, and into the streets of Cairo, where cassette tapes represented the first mass medium that Egyptian state power could not control.  03:49 Introducing the Cassette Theory Mixtape 04:06 Meet the Scholars: Eleanor Patterson, Rob S. Drew, and Andrew Simon 06:10 Diving into the Books: A Round Table Discussion 12:24 Exploring the Prehistory of Media Distribution 23:43 The Role of Cassettes in Indie and Hip Hop Culture 31:12 Cassettes in Egypt: A Tool for Revolution and Resistance 40:32 The Intersection of Media and Culture Hear the full 90 minute conversation by joining our Patreon! Please support the show at patreon.com/phantompower Links to Mack’s recent travels: Residual Noise Festival at Brown University Resonance: Sound Across the Disciplines at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis Transcript Andrew Simon: [00:00:00] Cassette tapes and players did not simply join other mass mediums like records and radio. They became the media of the masses. Cassettes in many ways were the internet before the internet. They enabled anyone to produce culture, circulate information, challenge ruling regimes, long before social media ever entered all of our daily lives.  PPIntro: This is Phantom Power. Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound where I talk to people who make sound and people who study sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I’m a Media professor at Miami University, and I just want to start off by giving a quick shout out to a couple of creative communities that I got to hang out in. I [00:01:00] just got back from the Residual Noise Festival at Brown University, which was this amazing three day event featuring ambisonic sound, art, and music pieces performed both at Brown and at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design.

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Sound is all around us, but we give little thought to its invisible influence. Dr. Mack Hagood explores the world of sound studies with the world's most amazing sound scholars, sound artists, and acoustic ecologists. How are noise-cancelling headphones changing social life? What did silent films sound like? Is listening to audiobooks really reading? How did computers learn to speak? How do race, gender, and disability shape our listening? What do live musicians actually hear in those in-ear monitors? Why does your office sound so bad? What are Sound Art and Radio Art? How do historians study the sounds of the past? Can we enter the sonic perspective of animals? We've broken down Yoko Ono's scream, John Cage's silence, Houston hip hop, Iranian noise music, the politics of EDM, and audio ink blot tests for blind people. Phantom Power is the podcast that both newcomers and experts in sound studies, sound art, and acoustic ecology listen to--combining intellectual rigor and great audio.