Simon Reynolds > Quotes

“Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“Forget subversion. The point is self-subversion, overthrowing the power structure in your own head. The enemy is the mind's tendency to systematize, sew up experience, place a distance between itself and immediacy.”
― Simon Reynolds

“Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“Glamour could be defined as the lie you tell so well you believe it yourself, and make others believe it too.”
― Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century

“Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“We are all making it up as we go along, unmaking our minds and remaking ourselves.”
― Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century – The Definitive Cultural History of David Bowie, T. Rex, and Theatrical Icons

“...noise annoys...”
― Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out

“Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable trauma).”
― Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture

“Jungle’s soundworld constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle’s treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you’d be vulnerable to trauma). ‘It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for,’ runs the martial-arts-movie sample in Source Direct’s ‘The Cult’, a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call ‘neurofunk’ (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips ’n’ blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don’t even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle’s strategy of ‘cultural resistance’: the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.”
― Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash

“This is what we did with our time; this is how we made it Our Time.”
― Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

“Retro’s stomping ground isn’t the auction house or antique dealer but the flea market, charity shop, jumble sale and junk shop.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“old music these days. He explained that the industry divided releases up into ‘current’ (which spanned from day one of release to fifteen months later) and ‘catalogue’ (from the sixteenth month onwards). But catalogue itself was divided up into two categories: what was relatively recent, and what was ‘deep catalogue’, to which music was assigned three years after release.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“The downside of shuffle soon revealed itself, though. I became fascinated with the mechanism itself, and soon was always wanting to know what was coming up next. It was irresistible to click onto the next random selection. Even if it was something great, there was the possibility something greater still would flash up next.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“(Mind you, according to Walter Benjamin, the twentieth century’s great philosopher of collecting, browsing and what we’d now call vintage shopping, ‘the non-reading of books’ is a defining characteristic of serious bibliomaniacs; he cites Anatole France, who blithely admitted that he’d barely read one-tenth of the books in his library.)”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“He revels in all the empowering conveniences that the iPod offers, like being able to ‘correct’ albums by removing their weak tracks (even on Beatles LPs, where he removes all the Ringo songs),”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past