Divine’s Disco Ball

The new edition of Divine’s classic tunes comes on a lavishly packaged dead tape format – the ultimate in eccentric collectability.

Do you own a DCC player? It’s not likely, let’s be fair. There’s a good chance that you don’t even remember DCC – or Digital Compact Cassette, the would-be replacement for the old-fashioned cassette tape that launched in 1992 and lost to MiniDisc in a war of formats that no one really wanted. Nevertheless, the DCC has its fans and a certain appeal to collectors of defunct tech, and so it is still – just about – alive, thanks mostly to the efforts of the DCC Museum, which collects old players, tapes and related ephemera and issue a new release every year on the format.

We tell you all this because the latest DCC Museum release is quite something – the sort of thing that you might want to own even if you can’t actually play it (and with that in mind, is also available in more commercially successful formats). Divine – Extended is a ‘greatest hits’ collection – though ‘best of’ might be more accurate, given that Divine’s records were not generally what you might call hits in the conventional sense. With 11 tracks on the DCC – including the 12-inch versions of  Shoot Your Shot, Love Reaction and Shake It Up – it comes with an analogue tape that has three additional tracks and uses the same BASF Chrome Video Tape as the DCC edition, ensuring higher quality than your standard tape.

But it’s the package that really sells this, at least in the luxurious Glass Disco Ball edition, which comes in – you guessed it – a seven-inch disco ball, one that has been hand-crafted with reflective glass squares and a pink plastic silhouette handle based on Divine’s appearance in Pink Flamingos. Inside, the tapes are housed in a print of Divine’s face. It looks rather magnificent.

The downside is that it’ll set you back $249, which might be a bit much for what is going to simply be an ornament for most people. But dammit, we would love to own one of these. It’d almost be worth buying a second-hand DCC player to go with it.

Less flush readers can buy the coffee table edition – pictured below – for $49 and this is also an impressive display item, albeit one that might remind you of what you could have had. You can also get the record on 12-inch pink vinyl for those of you who are into that format.

We love people who keep seemingly dead formats alive through sheer bloodymindedness and those who create wonderful works of art – so this hugely impresses us. What a mad folly, gaudy novelty and magnificent achievement it is – just the sort of thing that Divine would surely approve of.

https://www.dccmuseum.com/shop/dcc-releases/divine-extended-patreon-coffee-table-edition/

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