The Annotated Mixtape

by Joshua Harmon

"Most of the time," Theodor Adorno has noted, "records are virtual photographs of their owners." The Annotated Mixtape, a memoir of record collecting, cross-fades music with personal history and American history and culture (the 2008 recession, AM radio, Reaganomics, nuclear war) to show how music has informed the author's life.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Essays

401 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2014

About the author

Joshua Harmon is the author of the poetry collections The Soft Path, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, and Scape; the essay collection The Annotated Mixtape; the novel Quinnehtukqut; and the short story collection History of Cold Seasons. His chapbooks include A Little Remote from Reality, The Poughkeepsiad, Cascading Failures, and Outtakes, B-Sides, & Demos, winner of the 2019 Paul Bowles Award.

Reviews

[J.A.]

A truly great stitching together of a life and a life in vinyl.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harmon is a music lover and avid record collector. In this series of essays he uses songs as the basis to tell stories about his life, music history, and what was going on in the world at the time the song came out. As a fellow music lover I really enjoyed the premise of this book despite the fact that I didn't know many of the songs he used as the starting off point for his essays. I loved his introduction about music and the art of creating mix tapes. I did greatly prefer the essays that were more personal in which he told stories about what particular songs meant to his life at specific times to those that were more esoteric or covered non-personal topics. I'm not sure how much appeal this book would have to people who aren't greatly into music, but I'm sure fellow music lovers can identify with many of the things Harmon writes about.

[Jehnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Creative non-fiction.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyable. I'm a sucker for a mixtape memoir. I should write my own.