To the Editor:
Re “The Curious Comeback of Cassettes” (Op-Ed, Dec. 24):
In questioning why on earth the cassette has made a comeback, Rosecrans Baldwin maligns the cassette as a medium for recorded music, pointing to its generally inferior sound quality and penchant for physical deterioration. He laments how annoying it is to have to fast-forward to find the song you want at just the right moment and supposes its newfound popularity is due more to nostalgia than to any practical concerns.
Basically, he points out exactly all the reasons we still need the cassette. The cassette does not lend itself to on-demand listening. And when you play a cassette, you do not listen to only half a song before nonchalantly skipping to the next track. The cassette is for people with an attention span, people who are generous enough to let an artist curate a whole half-hour of listening, or in the case of a mixtape, between 60 and 120 minutes.
The cassette is a reaction against our attention-deficient, on-demand, fast-forward-through-life, listen-to-only-half-a-song culture. Digital-only recorded music has helped devalue the song and especially the album as art forms. People who want to own a cassette in 2015 recognize this and reject these disposable aspects of our culture.
DAN ZAJACKOWSKI
New York
Note from KBJ: The cassette is for morons. We got rid of it for a reason.
