DVD Review: So Wrong They're Right

You can buy an iPod for the same price as 20 CDs. Of course there are people in the sticks that haven't given up on 8-track.

--from a music industry chat board discussion on the future of the compact disc

In the annals of consumer audio formats, neither
128kps files on the iPod nor the 8-track tape rate very high on the fidelity scale. Magnetic or digital, portable audio is designed for convenience. The quality of the reproduction is secondary.

When Bill Lear introduced the Stereo
8 tape system to consumers in 1965, he was not embarking on an adventure in hi-fi. Lear's intention was to supply automakers (and the luxury private airplane industry) with an easy-to-use and more reliable version of existing audio cartridge technology that in one form or another had been used in broadcast and background music applications since magnetic tape recorders were liberated from Germany after World War II.

Lear's system was optimized for a moving vehicle. 8-tracks played back four separate stereo "programs" recorded on a loop of quarter-inch tape that would cycle through the machine endlessly, right up to and including the moment when some part of the plastic cartridge malfunctioned.

With its low fidelity, non-standard formatting that broke albums up into (arbitrary, not artistic) 12-minute chunks, and fragile playback mechanism, it is amazing that the commercial 8-track format survived for as long as it did, and that its fans still support a small but thriving secondary market. New(ish)ly released on DVD, the film So Wrong They're Right
preserves 8-track fandom for posterity--much, much longer than the tapes themselves were designed to last with normal use.

Shot during a coast-to-coast collector's odyssey by the editor of fanzine 8-Track Mind and featuring interviews with many of its regular contributors, So Wrong They're Right chronicles in loving detail the 90s subculture that grew up around an orphaned format most closely associated with the 70s.

The paradox of any subculture is that once enough cool people with shared interests find each other, they codify the fun right out of the ethos. Participants in the scene rather than objective observers, the filmmakers don't ask us to decide whether the format they love is timeless or past it. So Wrong They're Right simply records scenes from a decade--the 90s--awash in recycled culture. Some 8-track fans fancy the tapes and equipment as part of their retro lifestyle. Some are music and audio geeks (like a writer for
Stereophile) enjoying a fun goof on collector obsessions and audiophile connoisseurship. The core group of 8-trackers portrayed in the film would have us believe that it's all about the music: they are the creative free spirits who just want to listen; they have had it with a consumer electronics and music industry that tries to cram a new format down our collective throat about every ten years, and to prove it they proudly immerse themselves in lo-fi renditions of thirty-year-old pop.

Article Author: Rechercher

Rechercher is the senior editor of Beyond the Roots of Lounge and beyond, deux.

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