Punk Music on Cassette

Genre/Medium. 1980-1995. Various Punks

Punk music can only be encountered too late. Because it rejects the idea of a musical establishment of any kind, as soon as punk music surfaces it is immediately compromised and coopted as part of something. To hear punk is to hear sold-out punk. The scene is always already over.

Instead of destroying the genre, this phenomenon allows the recorded music to act as a memory for the moment that is now lost. There was a real moment in the past, it is gone, this album is what we have left of it. Punk is nostalgia driven. Punk turns into classic rock seconds after it is made.

Cassettes are an inferior medium for music. They never really sound great and they degrade very quickly. Even new cassettes are really only prompts that allow us to imagine what the music sounded like when it was live. Old cassettes are really only good for reminding us what they sounded like when they were new.