Lost Recordings: Elegy For The Mixtape by Ylajali Hansen. Ruminations on the discontinuation of the Sony Walkman.

Perhaps the mixed tape was one of the quotidian ways to resist the “grid of discipline,” or the numbing effect of late-stage capitalism. For it was indeed a way to manipulate a test-marketed, mass-produced piece of popular culture to conform to the rhythms of everyday life. “These ‘ways of operating,’” Certeau continues, “constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production.” The mix tape was a way to make life a little more interesting, a way (albeit superficial and diminished, in a grander view of things) to share emotional states and cultural taste in a milieu that militated against both.