Dinosaur Jr. Joins Cassette Revival
So what do you do if you're an aging rock band trying to stay in touch with today's youth? No, skinny jeans just aren't enough but maybe a cassette release, establishing your connection to a hip underground scene while giving it mainstream credibility, is the path! Dinosaur Jr. seems to be making just such a move with the release of "Cassette Trilogy", a limited edition box set of "classic" albums on cassette.
Dinosaur Jr. Cassette Trilogy
If you ask nicely, I'll explain my animosity towards Dinosaur Jr. in the comments, but I have only good things to say about Joyful Noise Recordings who specialize in unique releases in vinyl, cassette, CD and MP3 formats. I'm not sure why they're avoiding 8-tracks and reel-to-reel but simply seeing a release available in Cassette + MP3 is pretty darn cool.
Apparently they typically include an immediately downloadable MP3 with most of their releases which also feature some interesting art. Not impressed? Ok, what about a sleeping bag? You won't see that from Topspin!
The Dinosaur Jr. "Cassette Trilogy" is a box set featuring three albums from the mid to late 80s, "Dinosaur", "You're Living All Over Me" and "Bug":
"Limited to a one-time release of 500 hand-numbered copies, the Dinosaur Jr. Cassette Trilogy is packaged in a custom-built, screen-printed wooden box, featuring the classic Dinosaur Jr. "monster" artwork. The individual cassettes are manufactured on high-quality chrome tape with purple, black, and white shells. Each are individually wrapped with 8 panel original artwork."
50 sets will also include Sebadoh's "Weed Forestin'" which was originally released on cassette with "You're Living All Over Me". Plus, Joyful Noise Recordings also has some portable cassette players for sale via the above linked news item.
This is a nice offering from a well-established act that connects to both the current cassette scene and to old folks like myself that often bought new releases on cassette back in the day. Perhaps a similar dynamic is at play in the video for "Over It". Pretty cool for a bunch of aging rockers!
In addition to labels doing cassette releases mentioned in my previous post, here are more participants in the current revival of cassette tapes:
Not Not Fun Records via cyclpsrock.
Night-People Records via "the Strangler".
Also worth noting are Burger Records and ZAP Cassettes.
Plus, a graph of tape release stats from the late 1960s to now via Mind Booster Noori.
Dinosaur Jr. news via Hifidelics who recently launched Flexi of the Month about which I hope to post soon.
Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and blogs at All World Dance and This Business of Blogging. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
Such a silly trend lending itself to hipsterism more than anything else.
Please? “If you ask nicely, I’ll explain my animosity towards Dinosaur Jr. in the comments”
Despite the fact that this tale makes me look a bit childish, here’s what I pulled from the post because it was just running too long.
Coda:
Every time people talk about treating your fans and potential fans with respect I think back to seeing Dinosaur Jr. at the Cats Cradle in Chapel Hill in the mid 80s, a club where I also saw incredible sets from such bands as Sonic Youth and Redd Kross.
Dinosaur Jr. was playing a lackluster set of music that did not seem that distinctive to me at the time and apparently the always rather hip crowd at the Cradle agreed. This seemed to anger J. Mascis who, at one point, angrily blasted the crowd, shouting something along the lines of “Wake up, Chapel Hill! They loved us in Austin!”
It cracks me up even now but, given that they didn’t seem to be doing anything that I couldn’t get from numerous other bands and that J. Mascis seemed like a petulant little punk, I never listened to anything from them again except for the above linked video for Over It, which I watched once when it came out and once for this post. Guess what, my opinion has not changed one bit!