First introduced in the 1960s, cassette tapes quickly outpaced vinyl records as the medium by which spoken words and music were recorded, distributed, and shared. Tapes flooded markets around the world, including Egypt’s, in the 1970s. As Simon shows in a book organized to evoke a cassette—the two halves of the volume are called Side A and Side B—the impact was dramatic and long lasting. The arbiters of musical taste in places such as state radio and the Cairo Opera House lost control to small producers of popular “vulgar” music; official narratives such as the putative success of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit to Cairo in 1974 were subverted by widely circulated recordings of rude (and very funny) songs about the occasion. Although cassettes are no longer widely available in Egypt, having been supplanted everywhere by digital technology, their legacy of democratizing opinion and expression is still palpable.
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Source link : https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/media-masses-cassette-culture-modern-egypt
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Publish date : 2024-02-20 08:00:00
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