Photocopiers and Blank Tapes
DIY processes, productions, and representations in regional hip hop
HEADZ-zINe 2.3
Before I launch into this week’s main article, I wanted to tell you that HEADZ-zINe 2.5 (scheduled for release in 2025/36), titled ‘HEADZ-zINe: Volume 2 ‘SUBSTANCE’, Issue 5: OBJECT/MAKER, is in the making. This is personally an exciting issue for me, as it will explore in detail the DIY self-constructed and self-released cassettes that many headz during the eighties and early nineties produced. Included in this issue will be work from Ill Beat Posse/Ill Beat Productions, Def Defiance, Hidden Identity and many others, and will unpack the various contexts, praxes and microecologies that the works propagated. This week’s article serves as an introduction to Issue 2.5: OBJECT/MAKER.
Acknowledgements
Much respect to Evil Ed and Lone Disciple. Big shout to Blade and 691 Influential – the king of the DIY ethos in UK hip hop.
The cold facts, and still they try to Xerox
Who could have considered that the photocopier – that seemingly mundane piece of office equipment that sat in the corner of almost every office during the 1980s – would be fundamental to visual representation in self-released cassettes? Photocopiers clunked and slid, rhythmically sluggish, emitting their dull tones far from dulcet, drawing bored office workers into their hypnotic state of repetitive flux. Yet, when a cassette cover design was slipped onto its glass top, the photocopier became a vital actor in the micro/subecologies and economies of DIY music culture.
The essence of DIY music culture, and of particular interest to this article, DIY music production as product, began to gather momentum in the early 1980s. As the volume and complexity of clerical and administrative work soared during the this period, so too did a rise in self-released music. Advancement in technology made for more accessible and reliable photocopiers for office workers and cassette recorders for music makers. Whilst the presence of the double tape deck gained visibility in the consumer market during 1981 (courtesy of Onkyo), the photocopier had been in commercial production since the Xerox 914 machine in 1959. But it is the evolution and dissemination of DIY music product that shifted the photocopier as a cultural signifier from the mainstream workplace to the underground and subcultural music movements.
Cassettes manufactured on a micro scale in a domestic setting was nothing new when fresh hip hop artists began to document their processes and praxes. There already had been the punk, new-wave, post-punk, goth, rock and prog rock movements, all of which enveloped DIY music product to varying degrees. In addition to the DIY cassette production, bootlegged recordings of concerts and rare albums also found themselves with a similar value of cultural capital.