“Offering a comprehensive history of the cassette from its origins in post-World War II taping technologies to the recent revival of the music cassette as a hipster artifact, Unspooled is the first book to give an extended account of the various ways that cassettes have transformed musical culture. This wonderfully engaging, clear, and witty book will appeal to a wide audience of music fans and critics interested in mixtapes, cassettes, and cassette culture and will become a classic in many fields.” - Will Straw, Professor of Urban Media Studies, McGill University
“Rob Drew is one of my favorite writers on music, and I wish more people knew about his work. This is the definitive cultural history of indie music’s tangled but fascinating love affair with the audiocassette.” - David Hesmondhalgh, author of Why Music Matters
"Any readers who have ever received or created a mixtape will appreciate this narrative. A solid blend of history and nostalgia about cassette tapes that’s perfect for Gen Xers." - Tina Panik, Library Journal
"The story of the cassette tape Drew and Masters tell is compelling: how a lo-fi, accident- and deterioration-prone, and more-or-less parasitic audio technology not only achieved market dominance but captured a permanent place in the imaginations and practices of music-makers, labels, distributors, and fans the world over. Unspooled and High Bias show readers that the peculiar technology of the cassette tape exemplifies the inherent contradictions of popular music perhaps better than any other medium." - David Pike, Popmatters
"Divided into six sharp chapters, Unspooled walks readers through the rich history of music nerds who used cassettes in ever-evolving ways. By following the chronology, Drew provides a detailed exploration of the cassette in terms of format, medium, and artifact." - Adam P. Newton, Treble Zine
"Drew’s detailed yet concise narratives flow together well to create a more comprehensive history of audio cassettes. Joining Drew on his trips to the musical past is a nostalgic adventure, whether or not the terrain is familiar." - Linda Levitt, Spectrum Culture
"Rob Drew comes at the subject from the only place you can approach tapes – love. . . . It’s great little book and all the richer for the stories it tells." - Neil Mason, Moonbuilding
"Drew’s evidence valorizes the mixtape as a system expressing love, presaging messy low-fi formats as warm, crafted, personal artifacts. . . . The author tackles critics who perceive the cassette revival as a pointless resurrection of a dated technology, arguing adroitly that the cassette’s own idiosyncratic identity makes it a unique, irreplaceable medium. Highly recommended. All readers." - Choice
"Because it reveals the importance of the cassette in supporting underrepresented and underserved artists and artworks, Drew’s book provides a valuable resource for a variety of researchers active in, for example, popular music and gender studies, as well as culture, technology, and media scholars." - Navid Bargrizan, H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews
". . . Unspooled offers an immense contribution to cassette scholarship that will appeal to earwitnesses from the analog era as well as to curious digital natives. I trust that the book will be relevant to historians and sociologists of music as well as to scholars of cultural studies, media studies, and science and technology studies." - Linnea Semmerling, Journal of Sonic Studies
"This is a well-written and engaging book, and I highly recommend it." - Michael Higgins, Popular Communication
"Drew's book is a refreshingly readable and source-saturated insider’s view into a technological media and its social, economic and cultural implications. . . . It is also a declaration of love to the 'good old days' of the cassette with many useful and further reaching explanatory approaches right up to the present day." - Marco Swiniartzki, H-Soz-Kult
"Throughout Unspooled, Rob Drew traces the eccentric, dorky tentacles of tape culture — from the art of the mixtape to the music industry’s legal battles against the tiny giant, which children of the ’80s and ’90s religiously used to record music off the radio and friends’ purchases." - Adam Perry, Boulder Weekly
"There is something nobly romantic about how Rob Drew rolls out the history and mystery behind the cassette, the forerunner of the playlist and the source of the term 'mixtape.' If you were a rapper, punk, metalhead or DJ spinning hip hop or house music sets before Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube, you put your jams on cassette and handed them to friends, or duped the master and sold the tapes at your next gigs—all without gatekeepers or execs to hold you back. . . . Drew’s captures all of it in this love letter to a format that unexplicably survives, if only as a memory or souvenir." - A. D. Amorosi, Variety
"[A] detailed yet far-reaching exploration of how the humble cassette enabled the portability of music. . . . Drew uses a methodology that includes both a theoretical grounding in media studies as well as exploration of a wide range of technological and document archives to reconstruct the history and uses of the cassette since its emergence among audiophiles in the 1950s and the bootlegging of live performances." - Katherine Rye Jewell, EH.net
". . . Unspooled is a well-researched and engaging exploration of the cassette’s cultural impact, including the role of underground zines in popularising independent recording artists who self-released their music on cassettes." - Toni Sant, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"Unspooled is at its best when the cassette tape is shown to cause upheaval. The book’s ability to show how cassettes created legal controversies, shaped the distribution and discovery of music and helped people find meaning in both music and aesthetics cannot be understated." - Nathan Katz, Punk & Post-Punk
“In Unspooled . . . Drew models the kind of deft, gentle attention that emerges from sustained practices of thinking—attention to gender imbalances and strident women writers, to a raucously dispersed analog archive, to media specificity, and to a writing style so informed by musical sound.” - Andrea F. Bohlman, Notes
