Cassette Culture and the Resurgence of the Mixtape

How does one define “mixtape”? In simple terms, it is a compilation of carefully-chosen songs, often by various artists, primarily recorded onto a cassette tape by an individual. However, this straight-forward definition undermines the long-standing emotional element associated with the mixtape. Its continued relevance in music and material culture resides in an understanding of the background of the cassette and how it reflected musical ideals. The ease of recording music changed with cassette technology which impacted music fans. What had been the realm of specialists became quotidian for anyone who could purchase a tape player. Although cassettes predominated the music industry for a relatively short era, the tape industry changed recorded music and the mixtape created a collective nostalgia for a bygone analog era.

While the mixtape may represent cassettes, sharing, and the collective identity around musical knowledge, in the past twenty years the mixtape has become an icon of retro material culture separate from its audio roots. Today the mixtape no longer represents audio culture, instead it reflects technostalgia and an appreciation for an analog personal creation. While music underscores the foundation of the mixtape, the physicality of the object has come to mean an enjoyment of music and a gift of emotional connection, but more importantly a respect for the tangibility of a technology that required time and attention.

This poster reflects and continues the research in my recently published book Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation, The image of the mixtape as a marketing tool for products from end tables to microbrews highlights the appeal of kitsch and the use of nostalgic material culture to attract a generation who appreciates the opportunity to harken back to a simpler time. The choice of graphics and colors help situate the visual mixtape as reflective of the twentieth-century musical artifact. While many Americans consider cassette tapes as creations of an analog past, entrepreneurs and artists have found a way to reassert the mixtape into material culture as an intangible representation of an era, an idea, and a feeling which no longer needs to be held in a physical cassette.The visual representation of mixtapes from made-for-Netflix films to podcast art and comic books showcases how individuals use material culture to reflect complex ideas about collective memory and technostalgia.

A poster is the ideal format for this presentation because it can show historic mixtapes with their colorful cover art as well as the 21st century material culture mixtape. Moving across the poster from the past to the present, the visuals will reflect the time and attention paid to the early mixtapes, the nostalgic allusion to an idealized past in mixtapes at the turn of the 21st century, and finally the contemporary representations of the mixtape. Today a mixtape can be a representation of technostalgia, a term used as a synonym for compilations, or a reassertion of musical mixtapes as symbols of love.