They were the scourge of the ‘80s, and eventually disappeared as a music format. But cassette tapes are back as the latest hipster accessory, as clear by a recent Pitchfork article. “I only listen to cassettes,” hipster godfather/Sonic Youth majordomo Thurston Moore states in the piece, a reasonable barometer of the cassette medium’s buzz for sure. The Pitchfork piece also points out the growing presence of cassette labels: while seven-inch vinyl labels were the indie fashion of yesterday, today’s hipsters want their chillwave on cassette! Meanwhile, indie bands are using the seemingly obsolete medium as a signifier of cool—why else would trendy Aussie electro-popsters Cassette Kids use it in their name? In Dallas, someone even opened a museum devoted to eight tracks, where it’s possible to examine 500 copies of Rutles eight-tracks still in shipping containers and an autographed Led Zep tape, among other curios. So why the sudden upsurge in this once dead, now instant classic object? Like vinyl, tape actually holds sound, unlike how CDs reduce music to digital numbers. And it’s an object with easily identifiable nostalgic markers: unless you’re really young, who doesn’t associate the hiss of tape leader with adolescence? Cassettes, eight-tracks, cassingles—they hold too much John Hughes-style youthful associations to ever really go away. And, like so many classics getting resuscitated in our recession era, they’re cheap. Doesn’t get more indie than that…