The Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles

Long (Excavating the Memory Palace), an assistant English professor at the University of Nebraska, scrupulously explores the history and cultural resonance of the cassette mixtape. Made mainly by young people in the 1980s and ’90s and enabled by the cassette’s inexpensiveness and replicability, mixtapes were a last iteration of music as “something to touch, to take up space, to materially exchange—not just... hear,” according to the author. That materiality disappeared as music became digitized, with the late-aughts advent of smartphones unlinking music from specific physical formats, which turned listening into an increasingly private experience and fragmented the musical landscape. Yet the nostalgia for mixtapes and late 20th-century music persists, with record companies buying and marketing the archives of such megastars as Bob Dylan (who himself lamented the loss of music as a shared, tactile experience). Throughout, Long makes illuminating points about how media technology shapes culture in ways that can, ironically, make itself obsolete—mixtapes stoked demand for greater choice in music listening, helping pave the way for the rise of digital streaming. At the same time, he notes, mixtapes also serve as a nostalgic touchstone for a period when predigital items lasted for “cycles” long enough to capture a shared cultural moment, before digitization caused the media landscape to simultaneously accelerate and fracture. Comprehensive and meticulous, this will fascinate media scholars and audiophiles. (June)