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Cassettes, Codecs, and Cables: Revisiting Peter Manuel's Cassette Culture (1993) - Peter Manuel , Cassette Culture: Popular Music Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ISBN: 022-6-50399-2 (hb), 022-6-50401-8 (pb).

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Cassettes, Codecs, and Cables: Revisiting Peter Manuel's Cassette Culture (1993)
Peter Manuel , Cassette Culture: Popular Music Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ISBN: 022-6-50399-2 (hb), 022-6-50401-8 (pb).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2017

NIKO HIGGINS
NIKO HIGGINS*
Affiliation:
nhiggins@sarahlawrence.edu
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Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 14 , Special Issue 1: Tape , February 2017, pp. 153 - 158
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2017 

In his seminal 1993 work, Cassette Culture: Popular Music Technology in North India, Peter Manuel described how Indian film music went from accounting for roughly 90 per cent of all recorded music in India in the late 1970s to only 40 per cent in the early 1990s (63). In this brief period, cassette tapes became ubiquitous. Compared to the long-playing record, the cassette's durability, portability, and affordability helped spawn a proliferation of recordings involving regional, devotional, folk, and new hybrid music genres, providing a wider range of musical choice for music consumers around the country. Manuel detailed the many factors and dimensions of this transformative period, and implicitly challenged the discipline of ethnomusicology to put media front and centre as a catalyst for social change. This book's impact on ethnomusicological research stemmed not only from the choice to focus on media, but also from its persuasive account of how media and culture together drive musical change. It helped to challenge the primacy of ethnomusicological paradigms of area and genre, and opened a path for ethnomusicology to treat media not just as a corporate, deterministic tool for disseminating pre-existing musical taste, but also as a tool actively used by local entrepreneurs that altered musical production and consumption.

Cassette Culture remains a frequently cited work, but it is potentially undervalued because of the obsolete technology of cassettes. This review seeks to better understand its contribution in the present context of media studies and sound studies. In this ‘re-review’, I give a brief overview of the book and then offer some noteworthy points of comparison by reading Cassette Culture in conversation with research on two technologies central to the international circulation of music and sound in the digital era: the MP3 and the undersea cables that enable what is often thought of as the unrestricted transnational movement of music and sound. Jonathan Sterne's work on the MP3 and Nicole Starosielski's The Undersea Network provide helpful counterpoints to thinking about the crucial period of India's cassette transformation and globalizing changes in media technology over the last few decades, revealing how Manuel's focus on the cassette anticipated discussions of the social impact of the production and circulation of media central to recent scholarship in media and sound studies.Footnote 1

Manuel integrates a broad overview with ethnographic detail to show how cassette technology impacted India's music industry, music genres, and sociopolitical movements. In a series of chapters that progress from wide-ranging to sharply focused, he makes a convincing case for the impact of cassette technology by describing the advent of the cassette in relation to the international music industry. He first provides a detailed overview of the film-music-dominated industry in India until 1975, and then devotes a chapter to how cassettes transformed India's industry from essentially a centralized monopoly to a diverse array of large and small companies, as the cheap and accessible materials for cassette manufacturing enabled a proliferation of new, regional companies that weakened the corporate monopoly of HMV. Next, he highlights how cassettes enabled the emergence of hybrid genres such as the modern ghazal and the pop bhajan. In later chapters, he details the expanded interest in devotional, regional, and folk music genres. Keeping musical change in his sights, he also discusses at length two issues of central importance for the studies of music and media in the years that followed the book's publication: piracy and musical borrowing (or ‘parody’, as it was called in North India). Borrowing from Raymond Williams, Manuel treats ‘cassette technology as . . . a set of modes of production, which themselves not only influence but constitute cultural phenomena, from the social relations of musical production and consumption to musical style itself’ (19–20). Cassette Culture neatly articulates the central issues involved with mass media as it foreshadows the transformative changes of the digital era. Manuel's book was published just as CDs were beginning to emerge in India; his treatment of them as ‘novel curiosities for the rich’ (65) shows how the period of his fieldwork (1989–91) predated the issues of converging media that would occupy later research. The book also came out just two years after India's economy was opened to international investors, which is now widely understood as a significant turning point in creating a ‘new’ middle class of Indian consumers.

Chapter 9, in particular, stands out as a model for future writing on music and media. Manuel's discussion of the Braj region-based folk music genre known as rasiya is an effective example of rich ethnographic writing that gives his wide-sweeping topic local traction. It presents a description of the region with a brief history, an overview of the genre and related substyles, numerous translations of lascivious song texts, an explanation of the issues of gender that define the genre along with polysemic interpretations of specific rasiya songs, and sections that separately document a rasiya producer and singer, all while showing thematic overlap with the rest of the book. The broader themes – including piracy, the commercialization of bhakti (devotional music), parody (borrowed tunes), and the role of the cassette in enabling the mass dissemination of a genre that previously was performed more privately – come back in this chapter with clarity. Manuel skilfully writes about people, their interests, and how cassettes facilitate a system of relations that can be recognized along contested boundaries of genre, gender, class, religion, and region.

Cassettes and MP3s

Writing nearly twenty years later, Jonathan Sterne's unique combination of cultural studies, media theory, and science and technology studies has had a considerable influence on music scholarship by aggregating an array of work across disciplines that helps define the field known as sound studies.Footnote 2 While not directly in conversation with Manuel's work, Sterne extends his ideas in his book about the MP3 by showing what a sound format can tell us about people and cultural change. Sterne's theorization of the MP3 as a format offers a helpful framework through which to review the cassette transformation in India. By prioritizing the format, he focuses ‘on the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in’.Footnote 3 Manuel is mostly interested in how the cassette changed popular music in India through its transformation of the industry and musical sound itself. Sterne looks at the MP3 not in the context of music history but within a broader history of sound, technology, communication, and listening. While Manuel is not interested in histories of sound recording, practices of listening, or communication more broadly, he does start with the format – in contrast to a musical genre or bounded area – and traces the numerous meanings that emerge from cassette use in the context of 1970s and 1980s North India.

Aside from the obvious similarity in size (cassettes as compared to LPs, MP3s as compared to AAC and WAV files on CDs), both formats share an ease of duplication and circulation. As Sterne writes, this ease comes from the ‘container technology’ that applies to the MP3 as well as the cassette.Footnote 4 As opposed to the technology of a tool, cassettes and MP3s both hold sound to enable its movement for eventual playback on other devices. Treating the MP3 as an artefact, Sterne focuses on the details of the MP3 as a container, how it is made, how it works, and how it is used.Footnote 5 Manuel writes about cassettes implicitly as a container technology, though his characterization, like Sterne's, takes into account active human involvement. In his case study of rasiya he points out that cassettes are not ‘passive vehicles’ for music, and justifies this claim by comparing the differences between a live and recorded performance, including changes in vocal volume and the addition of instrumental accompaniment (214).

Just as Sterne does with MP3s, Manuel delves deep into tape. With precise descriptions, he brings his readers into duplication centres, itemizes the materials and costs of tape assembly and reproduction, and provides extraordinary detail about the local economics of cassettes in the Indian music industry. But in contrast with Sterne's work, Manuel describes cassette culture in India in terms of the musical and social ripple effects of cassette use, rather than exploring the sound technology of the tape medium more specifically. Sterne's interest in the MP3 as a ‘container for containers’ leads him to argue that MP3s are linked not just to prior technologies, but also to a history of sonic practices more generally.Footnote 6 He reveals how the kind of compression (called perceptual coding) that helps keep the MP3 so small is intertwined with overlapping histories of 1) the MP3’s creation in the early 1990s, 2) the technology behind perceptual coding in the 1950s, and 3) scientific research on hearing in the 1910s. The concept of perceptual coding is perhaps the main contribution of his argument since it offers a unique intersection between the history of a format and cultural studies: by requiring listeners to fill in the gaps that it intentionally leaves out, Sterne writes, MP3s actually play us. This raises the question of how, if at all, the arguments of Cassette Culture might be altered if cassettes were approached as artefacts, and how questioning the format of cassettes might change local practices of listening. Because Manuel does not tell us how tape actually works, it is easy to wonder what histories of sonic production might be embedded in cassette tape. What assumptions and practices of listening did cassettes draw on?

Studies of listening also offer a productive counterpoint to Manuel's Cassette Culture. When detailing the history of the MP3 and perceptual coding, Sterne mentions distracted listening as something that was assumed for, and therefore designed into, the MP3. In contrast, Manuel mentions a concern that cassettes are evidence of lessened musical participation, which risks oversimplifying the act of listening as one that requires full attention: distracted listening might be an overlooked – but productive – feature of cassette technology that Manuel does not address. Manuel uses the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, communication theory, and popular music studies as his theoretical foundations, so his Adorno-influenced association of listening to cassettes with the distracted listener as the archetypal passive consumer is not unexpected. However, more recent scholarship has problematized such an approach. Ruth Herbert clarifies the distinction between directed listening and distracted listening, and Anahid Kassabian suggests that there is a range between these two polarizations in which varied forms of listening exist.Footnote 7 Distracted listening is still listening, as Tom Rice points outs, even a form of listening that is potentially just as attuned.Footnote 8 So music blaring from the tea stall near my home in Chennai in 2008 was neither irrelevant and ignored, nor dominating and inescapable. Instead of ignoring it completely or sitting in rows of chairs as if in a concert hall, people tuned in and out, hearing snippets of lyrics, choruses, and prominent instrumental timbres interspersed with social conversations and the sounds of commerce.

Cassette Culture offers an important critical point for Sterne's work. The tendency for sound studies to be mostly Western in scope has been raised by Sterne as a problem.Footnote 9 While Sterne maintains that there is no universal or ideal listening subject, Manuel's work reminds current scholars of the important need for more in-depth studies of different uses of sound technology that will continue to expand the purview of media and sound studies into the non-Western world.

Cables and materiality

The most obvious difference between the cassette and MP3, however, lies in their materialisms. It seems possible that the MP3’s presumed immateriality, in part, led to Sterne's curiosity about the format, while the unquestioned materiality of the cassette led Manuel to leave it unexamined as an ‘artefact’. Nicole Starosielski's ethnographic and historical research on the undersea cables of international communication puts this issue in stark relief by reminding readers about the materiality of the virtual.Footnote 10 Circulation takes place not in the ethereal clouds, she writes, but in cables underwater. Despite popular notions of the internet as a tool of mass accessibility with a kind of shared utopian responsibility, transnational circulation is as dependent on physical objects as it was when some of us passed mixtapes back and forth in high school, or in the colourful, densely packed tape stalls I visited in Chennai in the late 1990s. Starosielski points out that these cables both shape and are shaped by local geography, politics, history, labour, and ecology. India makes a small but significant appearance in the book. Scholars of South Asia will recognize the names of two India-based massive corporations – Reliance Globalcom and Tata Communications – as ‘some of the largest owners of undersea cable networks’ (53). Circulation is therefore dependent on centralized routes of clustered cables in a handful of countries, routes built upon those previously established through colonial and Cold War histories. The undersea cables direct attention from limitless virtuality to the physical and therefore vulnerable reality of thousands of miles of encased bundled cables. Whatever assumptions about divesting cassettes and CDs we may have, the circulation of music and sound is thus still dependent on material objects.

The Undersea Network brings out an interesting poetic contrast with the theoretical argument of Cassette Culture involving agency in new media. Manuel points out how cassettes changed the music industry in India by putting the power of musical expression and dissemination in the hands of many, mostly upending assumptions about the centralized power of media corporations. This would seem compatible with current popular assumptions about the internet or Youtube era as enabling the increased access and circulation of the MP3, but instead Starosielski shows that the transnational circulation of digital media is ultimately in the hands of a few.

Cassette Culture foreshadows many of the central texts of media and sound studies research, as an exemplary exploration of the sociality of media.Footnote 11 Manuel accomplishes an extraordinarily ambitious task with broad research about the Indian music industry and detailed ethnographic writing that shows how the cassette in India both enabled and changed musical experience. He includes a staggering amount of detailed evidence and does so with theoretical rigour and ethnographic specificity. Manuel's book is a classic for reasons that mark an important juncture in media and music studies, and it offers a compelling case for sound studies and media studies to engage in the non-Western world with a rigorous and detailed ethnographic methodology.

Footnotes

1 Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Sterne, Jonathan, ‘The MP3 as Cultural Artifact’, New Media & Society 8/5 (2006), 825–42; and Starosielski, Nicole, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

2 See, for instance, his comprehensive introduction to the field, Sterne, Jonathan, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012).

3 Sterne, MP3, 11.

4 Sterne, MP3, 194–6.

5 Sterne, ‘The MP3 as Cultural Artifact’.

6 Sterne, ‘The MP3 as Cultural Artifact’, 828.

7 Herbert, Ruth, ‘Modes of Listening and Modes of Subjectivity in Everyday Life’, Journal of Sonic Studies 2/1 (2012), http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol02/nr01/a05 (accessed 1 September 2016); Kassabian, Anahid, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

8 Rice, Tom, ‘Listening’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. Novak, David and Sakakeeny, Matt (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 99–111 .

9 Sterne, Jonathan, ‘Hearing’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. Novak, David and Sakakeeny, Matt (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 73 .

10 Starosielski, The Undersea Network.

11 Bull, Michael, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (New York: Routledge, 2008); Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Taylor, Timothy D., Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001).