Mix Tape Memories and Fictions

This chapter considers indie rock culture's ritualization of mix taping. It argues that the indie mix tape tapped into an emerging understanding of popular music as a communicative resource whose creators made their feelings available to be deployed on listeners' behalf. In contrast to use of the term mixtape within hip-hop for DJ-created works of turntable artistry, creators and consumers of indie music constructed the mix tape as a gift that symbolically rescued music from the profane world of commodities. The mix tape's routines of announcing one's music tastes as a bid for connection outlived its heyday, as online vendors continued to deploy it as a metaphor to ground the daunting flow of digital music.