The Last Mixed Tape

Women in music are often celebrated for their honesty until that honesty becomes inconvenient.
From Nina Simone and Sinéad O’Connor to Courtney Love, Phoebe Bridgers, FKA twigs, Megan Thee Stallion and Chappell Roan, a familiar pattern emerges: when women assert creative control, speak politically, or refuse to be agreeable, they are labelled “difficult.”
This episode of The Last Mixed Tape explores where that label comes from and why it appears so consistently across genres, generations, and cultural moments.
Drawing on feminist theory, music history, and cultural criticism, we examine how “difficulty” has been used to discipline women in music, constrain their careers, and rewrite their legacies — often offering praise only once the damage has already been done.

In 1990, Sinéad O’Connor released Black Boys on Mopeds, a song written in response to state violence, national myths, and the stories governments tell after tragedy.
More than thirty years later, those stories feel disturbingly familiar.
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, we explore how Black Boys on Mopeds connects Thatcher-era Britain to the present day, examining how narratives around authority, legality, and morality are constructed, and why Sinéad O’Connor paid such a heavy price for speaking with clarity when silence was safer.

At the turn of the millennium, music became free and culture was changed forever.
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, we trace how capitalism slowly colonised music: from Napster and the backlash against Lars Ulrich, to streaming platforms that pay artists fractions of a penny, and finally to AI-generated music designed to replace creation entirely.
This is a story about nostalgia how language shifts, art becomes content, audiences become engagement, expression becomes data, and how those shifts reshape what music is allowed to be.
Indeed, this episode criticises Spotify itself and the ethics of streaming payment models.

Ten years after David Bowie’s death, Blackstar remains one of the most haunting and deliberate final works in modern music.
Often framed as a farewell album, Blackstar feels closer to something far more intentional: an artist confronting not just mortality, but the loss of authorship over his own legacy.
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, Stephen White explores how Bowie used Blackstar to design his own disappearance, refusing nostalgia, embracing abstraction, and choosing new musical languages at the very end.
Placing Bowie alongside artists like Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Plath, and Francis Bacon, this episode examines how creators across music, poetry, and art have turned toward death not as an ending, but as material.

Phil Lynott didn’t just write one of Dublin’s most beautiful songs, he revealed something deeper about identity, belonging, and culture.
In this episode of The Last Mixed Tape, Stephen White explores Old Town, Phil Lynott’s tender 1982 solo track, and why it remains one of the most intimate love letters ever written to Dublin.
Moving through Lynott’s life, his work with Thin Lizzy, Irish mythology, and his legacy as a Black Irish icon, this episode reflects on what it means to truly belong to a place not through bloodlines or permission, but through presence, love, and lived experience.
Forty years after his death, Phil Lynott’s music still speaks to modern Ireland, offering a quiet but powerful counterpoint to rigid ideas of identity.
This is a story about a song, a city, and a way of being Irish that is felt, lived, and heard.