1615793599-0/WhatsApp-Image-2021-03-12-at-9-(1)1615793599-0.jpg "photo khaled anam")
Lou Otten passed away on March 6. The 94-year-old Dutch engineer has been credited with inventing the audio cassette as we know it. While his sad passing took away one of the most innovative minds of the century, his loss seems more noticeable when you think of all the memories associated with the cassette itself.
The magnetic tape covered by a plastic covering not only changed the way the world listened to music but also changed the way we went by our lives. From pushing a pen in the middle to spinning the cassette on your fingers, getting to the desired track was a labour of love, before that love turned into intimacy with the invention of the Walkman. While Otten’s not with us, there are many who hold a piece of his invention very close to their hearts or as Freddie Mercury puts it, ‘Someone still loves you.’
“It was ’83 or ’84 when I had a cassette which had a compilation of all my favourite songs. That cassette got stuck in our car’s cassette player,” recalls veteran musician Bilal Maqsood. He kept trying to pull it out and it eventually broke. The Mera Bichraa Yaar crooner then tried to salvage the situation by sticking that tape together with nail polish; a trick he was trying for the first time. “And then when I played it again, I distinctly remember, there was a Paul Young song, Love of the Common People, I think. So that song would play and crack in the middle because of the nail polish. That broken part of the tape is something that stayed with me.”
Actor-singer Khaled Anam of Peera Ho fame feels indebted to Otten’s invention. It was quite a life-changing experience for a generation of listeners relying on the LP (Long Play). “Carrying music became so incredibly easy for us and so did maintaing our own collection,” recalls Anam. As far as his most prized cassette is concerned, Anam was able to lock one in after long deliberation. “It’s very tough to name one prized possession of the cassette from the thousands that I have. But this kind of should be among the top ten. Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. It has their greatest hits and obviously Paranoid in it. This is an original from the 70s.”
Bilal Ali from Kashmir seems to have inherited his listening from his parents. It was his father’s cassette collection preserved in a cabinet that set the tone for his listening experience. And it wasn’t until 1999 that the singer made his first personal purchase. “That’s when I understood how my father felt after buying a cassette,” remembers Ali. “The cassette was a Limp Bizkit album and it was probably the first thing I owned that was made out of plastic but moved me emotionally. I wish I still had it on me.”
For guitar genius Imam Hamdani who has collaborated with various artists, his fondest cassette memory, like many others of his generation, was Noori's. “I don’t have a picture but I can tell you the first cassette I purchased was Noori’s Suno Ke Mein Hun Jawan. I got it for Rs30 and I must’ve listened to it more than a hundred times, basically from the age 11 till about 14,” says Hamdani.
Abdul Rehman from Auj was as naughty a kid as he is a vocalist. He spoiled his father’s experience by taping something irrelevant over a collection his father really adored. “My brothers and I were no more than 10 years of age when we discovered the recording option on mum’s cassette player,” Rehman recalls quite fondly. “We took our parents’ most coveted cassettes and recorded, I don’t even remember, what over the songs. Then when my father played them and discovered what we had done, it was worse than when we’d tried to fill up his cigarettes with spices in order to 'help him quit.'”
For VJ-turned-singer Dino cassettes were more like a personal investment that he would cherish for years to come. As a boy in his early teens, Dino would save up money to buy a couple of albums together from the Off Beat music store on Boat Basin, Karachi. “I remember buying Michael Jackon’s Dangerous, George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice and P.M Dawn’s album all in one go," says Dino.
“I think that’s how my obsession with the cassette started and so much so that there came a point in my life where I owned about 700-800 cassettes but sadly they all got lost when we moved houses. So all I can say is, I have massive respect for Lou Otten for making so many memories possible for me.”
As for Sounds of Kolachi frontman Ahsan Bari, his memory of the cassette is attached to his love for Junoon. "I would listen to Junoon's album Azaadi over and over again, so much that the cassette for it stopped working. Then when Junoon was going to release its Parvaaz, I had told all the shop owners around me to tell me the moment the cassettes for it arrive."
To his dismay, a shop two to three kilometers away from his house had received 30 of Junoon's new cassettes. "My friend called me 7 in the evening to tell me they were selling like hot cakes. So I took Rs20 from my mom and ran. When I came back and finally heard that cassette, I can’t tell you in words how it felt."
Whereas for Ali Gul Pir, lets just say if it wasn't for Lou Otten, where would he have gotten the inspiration to become a rapper from? "Our mom used to drive us to our school which was 1.5 hours away from our house. So back and forth it was a there hours commute. It would get boring and our mom would listen to Indian songs. My brother had a Discman but I had nothing," said the comedian and artist.
"So one day I got good grades and my mom got me a Walkman. But it only had forward and not rewind. The first CD that I got - and that’s also my first rap music purchase - was Puff Daddy’s No Way Out, which featured the song It’s all about the Benjamins. Puff Daddy worked extensively with The Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie) and The Hitmen when creating the album. And I loved Biggie. I listened to it one and half hour straight. It was the beginning of my love for rap music. I would then change the cassette’s side because you couldn’t rewind. So I eventually wore that cassette out. I think I even broke it because of listening to it so much," he concluded.
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