Popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop's original academic journal (1971), later in that of a much-taught textbook (1995). In many minds at late century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: Western art music's true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn't have to matter – and critically minded, social science-trained pop scholars usually didn't care enough to argue. Yet music sociology's first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the 1980s and 1990s that was the New Musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. That, then, was the situation twenty years ago, at least in the Anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making.

Listeners of a certain age tend to think that the cassette tape fell out of favour sometime during the 1990s, but is experiencing a revival of sorts as curious Millennials discover the pleasures of mixtapes and decaying media. But cassette tapes have been in constant use since their invention in 1963. Outside of North America and Western Europe, the tape is still the predominant phonographic medium, and is unseating hard drives as the preferred medium for data storage. For whom, then, is this a revival? My article argues that the tape revival is less an attempt at neutral recuperation of the past than a purposeful rewriting of history. Cassettes are particularly potent because they signify death and decay more forcefully even than vinyl. Their acoustic imperfections and mechanical frailties are now aestheticized in novels and contemporary popular music. Even curated listening experiences, from podcasts to streaming services, are designed to replicate the mixtape. The second era of the cassette tape represents another example of Simon Reynolds’ concept of retromania, and can be fruitfully understood as a chapter in the evolving story of phonographic waste.

This article offers a history of the compact cassette in Poland from 1963 to 2015, focusing on its vibrant presence as the medium of choice for unofficial musical culture. I explore tapes’ capacity to reveal a history of everyday musical and technological fluencies: as a sonic archive they offer a window into networked epistemologies of sound under state socialism. Listening to homemade tapes – a process that builds on ethnographic encounters with their makers – I explore the work we can hear across the medium's noisy recordings and stress their position at the crossroads of musicology's methodologies. Tape's reusability, so carefully explained in historical anecdotes and technical manuals in the 1960s, facilitated democratic debate for the social movements of the 1980s. The format's fungibility and plurality made it not only a convenient conduit for discussion, but also a medium that – in form and substance – modelled the importance of dissent, revision, and return in political discourse.

Susan Rogers has lived many musical lives. As a faculty member at Berklee College of Music, she directs the Berklee Music Cognition and Cognition Laboratory, expanding her research in auditory memory, which she began during her doctoral studies with Daniel Levitin at McGill University. She also teaches analogue studio production, drawing on two decades of experience in recording studios. She is especially well known for her years working as Prince's staff engineer (1983–87), a period in which she not only encountered Prince's own unique uses of tape, but also created his now-infamous tape vault. In many ways, the immediate impetus for this interview was Prince's untimely passing on 21 April 2016. In previous interviews, Rogers had already emerged as a lucid commentator on Prince's work first-hand, but that context adds a certain emotional heft to this interview, conducted one month after the pop music star's death.

On 16 September 1976, in the neighbourhood of Cite du Havre in Montréal, Québec, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter named Christina ‘Tia’ Blake recorded a demo tape in Studio A of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Tia had responded to a general request from CBC Radio looking for original songs written by local artists. She recorded three original songs that Thursday, including one song about her father and another written for an old boyfriend. She and the CBC producer listened to the playback together. The producer shook his head. There was nothing there he could use. He gave Tia the tape to keep.