Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

by Simon Reynolds

One of "The Telegraph"'s Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?

Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity--the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism--never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. "Retromania "is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Pop Culture, Cultural, Criticism, Art

497 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2010

About the author

Simon Reynolds is one of the most respected music journalists working today, and his writing is both influential and polarizing. He draws on an impressive range of knowledge, and writes with a fluid, engaging style. His books Rip it Up and Start Again and Generation Ecstasy are well-regarded works about their respective genres, and RETROMANIA may be his most broadly appealing book yet. It makes an argument about art, nostalgia, and technology that has implications for all readerswhether diehard music fans or not. Its an important and provocative look at the present and future of culture and innovation."

Reviews

[Antonomasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars doesn't mean I agree with everything Reynolds says about retro and the state of contemporary music - instead I agree with Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) whom he interviews extensively, and who speculates about music having shifted from ‘its Renaissance period of recording’ (i.e. the last hundred years) and entering a period of ‘evaluation’ and reprocessing. ‘If music is recessing into some kind of archival period, I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just natural.’ I think the crucible of innovation, where stupid quantities of great new stuff are produced faster than most people can consume them, has simply passed to other areas of culture: especially information technology - and if many commentators are to be believed, television drama. (I've little desire to watch most of the big US series talked of in that respect, though I have seen Damages, a fair few Scandinavian cop series, and wouldn't mind getting round to Scandal.) Meanwhile, the younger generation currently shocks its elders not with weird recorded noises, but with different ideas about gender, and internet activity.

Reynolds himself (b.1963) can't quite decide whether the modernist idea of ever-forward movement in music, one which he absorbed as a fan of post-punk in the late 70s, and still retains as a gut feeling, is the "right" one, or if the explosion of innovation in the mid-1960s (the late-60s hippies being the first retreat into retro) is too high a bar against which music from all other times is essentially being measured. Most UK music journalists I grew up reading in the 90s (and the indie stars they interviewed) are Reynolds' age or 5 years either side - the outlook of people born in the 1960s or late 1950s shaped my own, so it's been really interesting to dissect it and understand where my assumptions came from, through them.

I'd been wanting to read Retromania ever since it was published, yet I only picked it up after I felt I'd resolved some of its apparent questions to my own satisfaction - in the last couple of months. I had listened to pretty much no music for 3 years, and no new music for a year more, and coming back to music had to accept that it would never again be possible to have "heard of everything" again, unlike in my late teens when, even if I didn't know what every band mentioned in an entire NME or Select sounded like (you couldn't then, when there was only radio, TV, record shops and the public library), I did know their meaning and affiliations in the world of the British music press. It's not just that I'm into more types of music than I was 20 years ago and so there's more to catch up on; a far greater volume of music is talked about in more places; people's tastes are more fragmented and individual. Even the best-informed people haven't heard of stuff loved by their friends who are avid fans of slightly different genres. One of the nicest bits of getting older is giving even less of a fuck about what people think: if I have to be blinkered to lots of music mentioned online, and concentrate on investigating what interests me most, then that's fine. There's only so much time, and I now care far more about enjoying music than about repeat listening an album everyone's talking about, but which I'd only rate 3-3.5. If said enjoyment meant mostly stuff similar to what I already liked, or familiar acts, that was fine.
Finally, there was the moment I discovered one of the first new artists I liked when I started looking: this interview with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith in Resident Advisor. A yoga hippie who looked over 40 and made novel ambient music? There was a good chance I'd like this stuff. (I really do.) What was also interesting was the total absence of reference to age (and I suppose the lack of mockery of new ageiness that used to be a staple of the indie press). Techno has always tended to consider older artists more as respected elders than rock, where they're traditionally dinosaurs who should fuck off and retire already, but there now are plenty of 40+ musicians in rock & pop widely agreed still to be producing good stuff, and as long as the music stands up, they're seen as themselves, not their age. For whatever reason (self-interest due to my & my friends ages?) that article caused an epiphanic reframing. Artist-creator led recorded music with shorter tracks is the form of our times as classical was the thing in the nineteenth century and therefore people of all ages practice it. As an individual, perhaps because of my own family background, I value the generational divide and feel that parents and children ought to have boundaries based on the music of their respective times (to the extent that I've thought that if I had had a kid I would stop listening to music with lyrics from after about 2000, in order to help this separation of identities, though I'd still need my newer ambient & minimal techno, as boring to most kids as the plain, easily washable shirt dresses I wear in summer). Yet that model so many people currently alive in the West think of as central to popular music is really just a blip characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century.

This is a wonderfully dense book: Reynolds goes into depth on several different aspects of pop culture, obviously with a focus on music. (Noticing that a few reviewers didn't expect a music book, I wonder if publishers relied only on Reynolds' name to signal that it was about music, which wouldn't work for readers not already familiar with him.) Its detail and analysis makes it worth ten times its length in shallow web articles on similar topics.

So completely is one plunged into a succession of subcultures that the experience is more like reading linked essays than a single book. Many are the best discussions I've read of the subjects. If I had physical copies I'd want to tear out several chapters and push them on friends who have the relevant interests, knowing they may not be interested in the whole book: especially the ones about record collecting (very discursive, not judgemental as you may think from the title, and with plenty of anecdotes about particular collecting scenes); hauntology, brutalism and British municipal retro, and retro-futurism (which as well as SF and material culture, also takes in innovative electronic classical, Stockhausen, Varese and their fellow-travellers).

In saying I wish I could quote half the book, that's not as much of an exaggeration as it sounds: I ended up with over 30000 words of highlights, not including the bits that label each line with the book title and date. In this post it's going to be impossible to say everything I'd like to.


There are a number of points on which I disagree with Reynolds - I value this book as one I had a great conversation with, rather than because it says everything I'd want to
Just from scanning through a few of the quotes and other notes, the following came up:

- It's now known that experiences of loss and abandonment are at the root of nearly all severe instances of hoarding, although I think the psychological research on this is very recent, from this decade, so perhaps one can't blame Reynolds for not centring on this. Asking questions about cultural loss would have been an additional, interesting way to explore individual collecting (and more relevant IMO than pissing about with French structuralist theory), why certain scenes become highly valued by collectors, and the collective online hoard of culture. (Thanks to which, people like me, who want to regain things without physical clutter can find listings and pictures of terrible old records from their childhoods, and repeat-play songs that were once elusive radio will'o'the wisps.) Personally, I think that because the pace of technological change is almost too much, people want to balance that out by using it to access comforting old content. Very few are nostalgic for, say, old browser versions (though I am, I want them to be the same as a few years ago with only security updates as difference) but many people are for the stuff they read about within the browser.

- There's mention of ways digital music has changed consumption, but not the one I've found most noticeable. Is it just me who feels that digital music has divorced them from tracklistings? I always used to know song names when it was all records, tapes and CDs, but now I've listened to many albums dozens of times without knowing all the track names, because I never stare at the listings. Instrumental albums in particular, I experience as single works, like a classical symphony, and unless some favourite moment (usually a bass drop) makes me check titles, I find it weird to talk about the tracks as individual units.

- He underestimates clothing fashion, assumes it can't be intellectualised and incorrectly sees revivals as divorced from politics and history (several trends were obviously connected to the financial crash). It's possible to be just as geeky about fashion and beauty as about music and film, but this isn't obvious to outsiders because its popular image is vapid, and most fashion magazines (other than Vogue and a couple of others that I'm not sure are even still going) write about it in a vapid way. Blogs with more analytical approaches may well post-date this book.

- Another issue of timing: Reynolds is enthusiastic about hypnagogic pop and the revival of 80s synth sounds by young musicians. (One of whom has a theory I like: that they heard 80s music as babies & toddlers, sleeping with radios on in the next room, and the haziness of these records is because the 80s sound subconsciously feels right that way.) I was getting tired of that sound already in 2011-12 and expected it to have gone by now. Rip van Winkle returns in 2016 and finds it's more ubiquitous than ever. I started calling it landfill dreampop, convinced it's this decade's sound that won't die, like the boring post-ladrock that was landfill indie in the 00s.

- Personal hobbyhorse: Reynolds criticises contemporary futurology as focused on consumer trends but not its greater conceptual laziness. I am sick of futurology which ignores environmental factors (stuff humans only know how to make from petrochemicals; climate change and especially related migration & political instability), and the automisation of jobs and what that may do to mass consumption and tax revenues. History that ignores major macro factors is obviously rubbish, yet everyone apparently puts up with the equivalent in predictions.

- He underestimates the effect on his attitude of having heard so much before: it's inevitable that hardly anything sounds new to an avid music fan of his age. I've mitigated the same effect in myself by a) at the age of around 30, seriously getting into genres I barely knew and b) later taking all that time off from music, which was for other reasons, but in retrospect was really interesting & productive in a lot of ways. (It feels like it was a sort of extended meditation. I am comfortable with silence in a way I never used to be. And I'm now interested in new material by bands whose output I'd ignored for 10+ years). The commentary lacks the awareness gained from personal experiences like when I first really listened to Eno's Another Green World and realised, about 20 years after the fact, that Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, a band who seemed really different when I was a teenager, were massively derivative of it. If I'd heard Gorky's only after Eno, of course I would have had a different opinion of them. Younger people are inevitably less jaded because so much more sounds new & fresh to them.
What was the last major popular music movement in the UK? Reynolds feels it was rave (he was there), with only a cursory nod to dubstep (my answer; at the time he was a middle-aged dad in New York). Many my age feel it was Britpop. Libertines fans now 30ish found the band hugely significant. I'd love to see this as a survey question addressed to music fans of different ages & affiliations.

Perhaps it's the effect of my years off, but apart from the landfill dreampop, music in 2016 is sounding newer and more interesting to me than music in 2006, a year when I also started paying close attention to new music after several years of doldrums - albeit at that point mostly NME indie / garage rock revival bands; it would be a while before I found interesting stuff that became favourites, like Battles' Mirrored, of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, and Norwegian space disco.

These days one's impression of public opinion/ behaviour is inevitably skewed by what one reads (that may be completely different to what someone else is reading - this so badly needs its own term and 'idioculture' which it should be, is apparently taken by something else). But in 2016 I have the sense that serious 20-30 something music fans are more interested in the new than were the indie-folk-Americana-curating hipsters from the late 2000s described in Retromania.


This book has already added to my life musically:

- Apple lossless: One of those occasional revelations that makes one re-annoyed about a past one thought accepted and settled. In 2008 I ripped and sold hundreds of CDs, whilst living with someone who considered that physical media was dead. (He would, though, have nothing to do with Apple software, like many cool geeks pre-iPhone, so one can hardly blame him for not knowing the plethora of options in iTunes.) Reynolds repeats an anecdote from GQ editor Dylan Jones' 2005 book iPod, Therefore I Am in which Jones discovers the ALAC option after ripping all his CDs. But that was only a matter of weeks or months, and he still had the bloody things. I had no idea the option was there all that time ago, so I have a load of crappy 128kbp rips from stuff that went to charity shops (profligate idiot, didn't even sell them) eight years ago. Naturally I've now redone much of the random selection I happened to keep, the ones I listen to, at any rate. And converted a bunch of stuff I'd ripped more recently as unwieldy wavs. I've also got to know iTunes a bit better; a few of weeks ago I thought its sound quality unbelievably terrible, way worse than, say, the Amazon cloud player; have now improved that a fair bit with settings adjustments, though I remain slightly suspicious of it.

- Bob Stanley compilations: As a couple of friends have always been big Saint Etienne fans, I was vaguely aware of the Saint Etienne Present[s]... compilation series before, but never really felt the urge to investigate. For whatever reason, the material in Retromania about collectors who make compilations of rarities from the 50s and 60s, and Stanley in particular (perhaps because most of the others mentioned were Americans) caught my imagination and I've been slightly obsessed with these compilations since a couple of days after starting the book. I've now listened to almost all of them that are available on Tidal (free trial), and heard bits of several others by finding individual tracks. (Most of his recent comps from the last couple of years are on Stanley's Croydon Municipal label.) I like the idea of lounge compilations but in the past have usually found too many slow / miserable songs on them. I was surprised that I enjoyed a lot of tracks on Stanley's selections generally, and found several my favourite whole compilations. Soho Continental is allegedly the kind of music that would have been played in the Colony Room in the late 50s and early 60s, but that wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't enjoyed the music itself. So summery too. Songs for Swinging Ghosts is comedy-horror themed rock 'n' roll, and also made me realise that I'd probably like Max Bygraves' songs, and that I ignored him for too long due to music journo jokes, despite being unafraid to like similarly infradig stuff. It's a Scandal! Songs for Soho Blondes is wonderfully camp. The one I've played most of all is Such a Much! RnB Girls of the 50s and 60s. I don't enjoy 60s girl-group compilations quite as much as everyone else does, too much saccharine and high voices - though I find girl groups easier listening when I know the singer also didn't have the kind of impossible idealised happy-ever-after mentioned in the lyrics, e.g. the Ronettes. This compilation isn't that sort of sound: it's full of assertive altos: like almost-famous versions of Aretha Franklin's Think, and sounds that are more rock 'n' roll or upbeat developments of 30s jazz. I don't enjoy contemporary RnB, but on the basis of this, I could do with getting into early RnB more. (Recommendations welcome from people who know their stuff).

- Hauntology: I know and like Demdike Stare (dark ambient hauntology, from a scene which has used several witty titles referencing to dark bits of northern English history, as here, the Pendle witch trials) - but was reminded here that I'd never systematically listened to enough other hauntology, although I love the idea of it. Running through a lot of the music, as well as the artwork and conceptual framing of the project, are ideas of a lost utopianism: the post-welfare-state era of benevolent state planning and social engineering.... With the UK school of hauntology – the Ghost Box groups, Mordant Music, Moon Wiring Club – this sense of loss is culturally specific. What matters here is not so much the fact of sampling (and the way it foregrounds and intensifies the supernatural subtext of recording) but the specific material being used and the associations that it carries. The immediately noticeable thing about all these artists is that they use exclusively British voices: often creaky thespians and plummy poets from spoken-word LPs, or dialogue snippets from vintage mystery and horror programmes.


Retromania has greatly increased my respect for Lopatin. He's not only an inventive musician (some of whose work I enjoy, some of which is too noisy for my ageing ears), he has many of the best insights in the book:
- the emergence of the Internet as a landscape of the sublime, occupying a roughly equivalent place to Nature in the imagination of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composer, and to the city for the twentieth-century composer.
- With individuals and businesses throwing out info-tech every two or three years, obsolete computers are a huge environmental problem. ‘I’m super into formats, into junk, into outmoded technology,’ says Lopatin. ‘I’m super into the idea that the rapid-fire pace of capitalism is destroying our relationships to objects.
- He argues that the idea of ‘progress’ itself is driven by the economic requirements of capitalism as much as by science or human creativity. In a 2009 manifesto-like article, he decried the fixation on linear progress, proposing instead the opening up of ‘spaces for ecstatic regression … We homage the past to mourn, to celebrate, and to time travel.’


This review can't be bothered to have a conclusion, and was, by no particular design, brought to you by an antisocial number of repeat plays of the doubly retro 'Heard it through the Grapevine' by The Slits (which I only discovered today, having never been into the original).

[zed · Rating 4 out of 5]

What was it Winston Churchill who said those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it? In the case of modern pop music it may as well be a case of those that play pop music are doomed to repeat it. That is if one agrees with Simon Reynolds mainly polemical 420 pages on what he calls Retromania.

What is Retromania? First we have to get out of the way that Retromania is not the same as nostalgia. Nostalgia is in a nutshell memories of time and place. Hence hear a piece of music from the past and a time or place is brought into the imagination. Retromania on the other hand is the fact that modern music relies on the past. He writes that this is not really a new thing as such but there is a modern tendency to rapidly relive the past via retro use of music with in a very short period of time. He goes back as far as The Beatles who morphed into what they were when as a new band starting out their main playing style was Rock n Roll from a few brief years prior and all morphed into what they became. Being a long book this is on my part a simplistic take with the author going into great depth of detail.

It might be worthwhile to point out that this book was released in 2010 so at the time of me reading and then writing this review a decade has passed. In my opinion not much has changed, so I think the author is very much onto something. Music seems to me at least to have reached a point that there is next to no “brand-new sounds” that I know of. I am a music devotee of the highest order. I am looking to always find new artist to thrill me and I find many. The age of streaming services have been a godsend for me. Interestingly, when the author touched on these services he was convincing in his suggestions that the vast majority of a younger generation who had not lived the past thought that what they may have been listening to was a brand-new sound when it was Retromania on the part of the artist. And many an artist he interviewed admitted as such. “new old music” as he called it is just that, new old music.

When finishing this book I thought of a few of my none-scientific anecdotes that make retromania a truism for me.

A work colleague of the same vintage as me about 10 years back said he didn’t like modern music. What do you mean as modern music, I asked. Rap he said, they don’t make good stuff like ELO any more he said. Rap was hardly modern at that time and as this book convinced me that ELO were the epitome of Retromania even in their own time.

My manager, also the same vintage as me, has admitted his musical life ended with his youth. AC/DC and Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young are all there are and nothing other counts. Who are you playing he asked, King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard I replied. He then went into hysterical laughter and stormed back into the outer office and uproariously laughed about the name to one and all and then got the shock of his life when the much younger brigade said yes they had head of them and liked them rather a lot. Stupid name he mumbled to himself without realising that the name is a nod to The Doors Jim Morrison and King Gizzard are at times a victim of Retromania as their sometimes Psychedelia is really another retro nod to a past style.

Just recently when walking in a nearby park one afternoon I came across a lass in her 30 playing a Harp in the warm winter sunshine that is Brisbane. We got chatting and she gave me a lovely impromptu song or three. US harpist Joanne Newsome was discussed. When I first heard Newsome a decade back she did seem like a brand-new sound to me, but in reality she based a lot of her music on past folk styles. Be that as it may, I told my harpist about this book, and she recommended Bjork’s fairly recent Vulnicura as very much a “brand-new sound”. I have since given it a listen a few times and as much as it is a fine album, it is really retro if the truth be told. Strings are aplenty in the Trip Hop style and also ambient electronica. Maybe my park harpist had not really listened to too much trip hop?

I watched a game of Australian Football on TV and after the game a player was presented a sound system for best on field. The presenter, a player from a past age said you can now play Pat Benatar in one room and Cat Stevens in another. The young player said I don’t even know who they are. Yes old man who are these has beens? I laughed.

And that comes to my final comment. As much as a music tragic such as myself can listen to music from the dawns of time to whatever is the latest release, the fact of the matter is that what we all once liked (and still do) becomes redundant. All there is is retro and even then it is nothing but a mania.

Highly recommended to the poor old music lover who is always looking for that brand-new sound.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think "Retromania" is the best music book of the 21st Century so far. But of course I am not including the great rock n' roll memoirs, but just talking about "music books" as a cultural thing. And this is a very important book to me, with respect to how music fans react to pop in general. If you are like me, a long term fan of pop music and its trends, and you are middle-aged, one thing comes to mind. There is nothing new happening in contemporary music. In fact its a shocking fact. If i get a buzz on something that's out there, more likely it came from the distant past - the 60's or 50's even.

Simon Reynolds doesn't have an answer for all of this, but he is the first writer of my generation to comment on how pop is just plain old. And old is not really bad, but...its still old! Reynolds even goes beyond music and into fashion as well. His knowledge of pop culture is right on the dot, with respect to him focusing on various trends and readings on contemporary culture. I also find his writings on the download culture fascinating. And if you are a music fan, one can imagine that one is busy downloading as fast as they can, but more likely not hearing everything. So therefore we're hording music instead of enjoying and thinking about music. And is this a good thing? Most say no, but habits are hard to break.

What i do know is that the shock of the new probably won't happen to me in my life time. I remember certain records giving me that 'wow. The Yardbirds double A single of "I'm a Man' and "Still I'm Sad." The first Roxy Music album. And the Kinks "Village Green Preservation Society." The first listening of those records put me into the 'now.' And that is what's missing in my listening life right now - the 'now' factor.

[M.L. Rio · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a rare example of too much information, not enough theory. Reynolds' knowledge is certainly expansive; he takes the reader on a cultural tour of every backward-looking music fad from the 1950s until 2005. It's interesting for about 150 pages, and then it starts to feel like he's just showing off; it's a lot of detail without a lot of direction. He seems principally concerned with cataloging so-called 'Retromania' (which is ironic, considering his disdainful dismissal of pop culture 'curators' and collectors) and only sandwiches an actual hypothesis about why the present's love of the past is so prevalent into the last few pages. Ultimately an interesting but unsatisfying read.

[Matteo Fumagalli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/4c62-uTjAzU

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

With some editing, this would easily have been a five-star book. The subtitle is a little inaccurate. It's really about pop music. Other aspects of popular culture are introduced, but only by way of making points about the relentless recycling of ideas in current vernacular music. Reynolds is an astute thinker with astonishing rock and roll erudition and a terrific prose style - he manages a tone that successfully combines academic respectability and hipster elan. I told a friend I was reading Retromania and he asked me who wrote it. "Simon Reynolds?," Tom said, "He's my favorite rock writer!" I can totally see why. At its best (the chapters about YouTube, record collecting, hipster curators and 'turning Japanese'), this book was positively thrilling, even if there were moments of squirming self-recognition. "I can't be the only person," Reynolds writes, "who ferociously covets these box sets yet finds them strangely repellent once they've got them. With its packaging resemblance to a coffin or a tombstone, the box set is where an old enthusiasm goes to die: a band or genre you loved frozen into an indigestible chunk." I lost a little enthusiasm in the "Tomorrow" segment of the book, partly because Reynolds was writing about genres of music, e.g.'hauntology' and 'hypnogogic,' I had never even heard of, let alone heard, but mostly because he was beginning to repeat himself. I also started to feel that Reynolds accepts the Romantic 'cult of originality' a little too uncritically. Nevertheless, Retromania was a fantastic book - with a little more discipline it would have been near-perfect.

[Jeff Golick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Or really, 3.5 stars. Reynolds is a very good writer, and a very good thinker on music and popular culture. Here, he tackles the current state of pop music: pop is essentially eating itself, digging into the past and endlessly recycling old tropes rather than coming up with something new. Some don't see a problem with this state of affairs; Reynolds laments it.

The book is knee-deep in examples of this kind of recycling, so much so that it almost becomes simply another cog in the retromanic machinery. Many of the chapters read like isolated essays -- or at least as essays that had independent origins: on recording collecting and reissue fetishization; on various revivals (punk, '50s, Northern Soul); on the end of "The Future" in music. He really hits his stride, though, in a long last chapter that is perhaps a bit heavy of cultural theory, but which ties together many of the (overly) well-made points from earlier sections. In the end, I shared Reynolds' pessimism even as I don't naturally share his longing for Something New.

Though lacking a strong through-line narrative, I can certainly recommend the book to anyone who wants to delve deeply into the state of current pop (and future pop, and pop past), and moreover to anyone for whom the anxiety of influence, as a phrase, seems perfectly apt when applied to today's musical landscape.

[Mauricio · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to make a confesion: when I got to the second half of this title, I started to skip huge sections of it. It just wasn't as interesting as its first half. Somewhere along the way, Reynolds trips on his own knowledge (which is very vast) and loses the premise that justified the existence of this book: why do we live obsessed with our immediate pop culture past and what does it mean for creativity and culture?

When I was finally done with this reading, I started browsing Goodreads for other people's reviews. I needed to make sense of what had just happened. I mean, Retromania goes off to a very good start, taking a rather light topic, and approaching it both in a scholarly and a fun-fact-did-you-know manner; indeed a promising attempt to understand how modernity became so retro. Unfortunately, as the book progresses, it becomes just a detailed inventary of obscure niche fads that didn't seem to add much to the overall story.

Another thing I found odd: the book seems focus just in music, fair enough. However, here and there we also got glimpses of fashion, cinema, television and even architecture. Yet, they don't have a strong hold on the narrative of the book, and because at some point Reynolds drops its scholar approach, the pieces don't add up once pulled together.

Paraphrasing some of the reviews I read for this book:

1) It would have been a great editorial piece on a specialized magazine, but it did not justify a 500+ page book.
2) The book does have interesting arguments. If this is a topic of your interest, maybe consider reading the sections that resonate with you, and feel free to skip the ones that don't add any value.

[Edmole · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was odd reading a book by Simon Reynolds that wasn't positive and excited, as with Rip It Up and Energy Flash, but there was still a lot of brain food and enjoyment to be gleaned.

Having been born in '78 and become a music fan/fanatic/know it all in my teens, most contemporary music has always been recombinant and more aware of its past than its future, but Reynolds is right in saying that that mode has become more total and more acceptable in the last decade.

Previously Reynolds' books have sent me off on a frenzy of downloading. This one has confirmed for me that I need to switch down, switch off, listen to and engage with music properly. To get out of the rat-a-tat f5, bulk download, Youtube Facebook link alt-tab skip repeat shuffle habit which makes music little more than a water feature in the mind, a pleasant babbling stream, immaterial and unimportant. Music is meant to stimulate, to make you feel things sharply, sincerely, excitedly. But the kind of cokey/porny/electrode monkey hyperstimulation of rattling around downloads, Spotify, 120 years of history with no pause or mystery, it's time to give it a break.

[Gancu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Retromania: O tym, jak popkultura utonęła w swoim własnym archiwum

Z socjologicznego punktu widzenia "Retromania" Simona Reynoldsa to nie tyle analiza muzyki, co studium zbiorowej obsesji współczesnych społeczeństw na punkcie przeszłości. Reynolds nie tyle opisuje popkulturę, co prowadzi jej psychoanalizę, odkrywając kolejne warstwy nostalgii, lęku przed przyszłością i kompulsywnego kolekcjonerstwa. Książka to nie tylko lament nad śmiercią awangardy, ale także ironiczna opowieść o ludziach, którzy zamiast patrzeć w przyszłość, świadomie wybierają życie w muzykologicznym muzeum.

Retro jako światopogląd

Reynolds zauważa, że świat zachodniej muzyki popularnej zatrzymał się w miejscu. Gdzie podziała się ta ekscytacja nowością? Czyżby kultura kreatywna ostatecznie ugięła się pod ciężarem archiwów YouTube'a i bezdennych playlist Spotify? Jak każdy dobry socjolog wie, przeszłość jest towarem luksusowym. Możemy sobie pozwolić na nią dzięki technologii, która pozwala na przesiewanie miliardów dźwiękowych artefaktów w tempie, o jakim bibliofile XIX wieku mogliby tylko marzyć.

Problem w tym, że współczesna popkultura nie tylko celebruje przeszłość, ale wręcz unika teraźniejszości jak ognia. Dlaczego? Reynolds sugeruje, że po prostu straciliśmy wiarę w przyszłość. Internetowy nadmiar informacji uczynił nowoczesność zbyt trudną do zdefiniowania, a techno-optymizm lat 60. i 70. stał się przestarzały jak magnetofon szpulowy.

Kompulsywne kolekcjonerstwo jako strategia przetrwania

Najciekawsze fragmenty książki dotyczą obsesji na punkcie kolekcjonowania. Reynolds opisuje scenę "crate diggerów", czyli ludzi, którzy przerzucają tony zapomnianych winyli w nadziei na znalezienie jednego, idealnego breakbeatu. Warto w tym miejscu przypomnieć słowa Pierre'a Bourdieu: nasze gusta są ściśle związane z kapitałem kulturowym. Dla niektórych posiadanie unikalnej wiedzy o zapomnianych nagraniach z Ghany z lat 70. jest równie prestiżowe co posiadanie Porsche 911. Ale czy to jeszcze miłość do muzyki, czy już ekonomia symboliczna?

Reynolds zwraca też uwagę na fenomen "hauntologii" – nostalgicznej estetyki, która odtwarza brzmienia lat 60. i 70. w celach artystycznych, ale bez aspiracji do innowacyjności. To dźwiękowa wersja instagrama retrofuturystycznych reklam z lat 50. Przyszłość w ruinach, wieczna recyklingowa melancholia.

Kapitalizm i recykling estetyczny

Jednym z najmocniejszych argumentów autora jest związek pomiędzy kulturowym recyclingiem a ekonomiczną koniecznością. Kapitalizm kocha retro, bo retro to bezpieczna inwestycja. Nowość to ryzyko, a w dzisiejszych czasach korporacje wolą inwestować w dobrze sprzedające się formaty: rebooty, covery, sequele, playlisty z hitami sprzed dekady. Gdy ekonomia się chwieje, popkultura chowa się pod bezpieczny kocyk nostalgii.

To dlatego w 2016 roku nadal słuchaliśmy tych samych 80s'owych syntezatorów, co w 2010. I to dlatego streamingowe algorytmy zamiast podsuwać nam "nową awangardę", serwują zestaw "muzyka, która ci się spodoba, bo brzmiała tak w twojej młodości".

Kultura bez przyszłości?

Czy z tego labiryntu nostalgii jest jakieś wyjście? Reynolds nie daje jednoznacznej odpowiedzi. Podobnie jak wielu czytelników tej książki, zdaje się oscylować między gorzką ironią a melancholią. Jego "Retromania" to książka ważna, ale też przewrotnie zabawna. To jak słuchanie DJ-a, który zamiast pchać imprezę do przodu, zatrzymał się w archiwalnych setach, ale gra je tak hipnotyzująco, że nie da się od nich oderwać.

Czy "Retromania" to najlepsza książka o muzyce XXI wieku? Być może. Czy jest przygnębiająca? O tak. Czy można się z nią zgadzać? Nie do końca. Ale jak każda dobra analiza socjologiczna, zadaje pytania, na które nie ma łatwych odpowiedzi. I za to jej wartość. Tak zaczynam literaturę do Magisterki xD

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Simon Reynolds defines his modernist aesthetic as a "belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future." For me, that simultaneously asks too much and too little from pop, but Reynolds' previous books, where he's argued for the importance of that aesthetic in driving post-punk and electronic music forward, have encouraged me to pay attention to music that I may under-appreciate.

Here, though, Reynolds assumes the value of that aesthetic, so that even when I agree with his presentation of the facts, I'm unswayed by his conclusions – sometimes I feel like he's just sad that there are no new genres for him to awkwardly name. What's more, his presentation is bogged down by a grad-student-y weakness for treating mere accidents of language as insights into cultural design. (Worst offender: "The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness.")

There's interesting information amidst all the anxiously theorized generalizations. I'm glad I now know the origins of Sha Na Na (a Columbia history major who was unsettled by the sit-ins and had just read The Outsiders decided to invent '50s nostalgia as a way of re-unifying the student body). But Reynolds' major assumptions are so far from my own that I don't even feel compelled to argue with him.

And dude should really Ctrl-F "redolent" before submitting his next manuscript.

[Snem · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely well-researched. You can tell this guy knows his stuff. Very knowledgeable particularly about music and a wide variety of bands represented here. The most compelling discussion here was regarding futurism, which is interesting considering the title of this book. Gave me a lot to think about.

I know this book was written in English, but I understood so little of this it might as well not have been. I can’t even do a good job of summarizing this book. It’s a seemingly endless list of bands and music I’ve never even heard of.

It’s clear to me I missed the point here, it whooshed right over my head. It just wasn’t for me, but if you’re big into music it might be for you.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept nodding along to everything YES YES YES YES and full agreement gets tiresome. Also the writing was denser than I'd hoped. Also the idea isn't as new as the author seems to hope. So I bailed and will give him 3 stars for effort. This is an important and possibly ruinous phenomenon in current culture -- a society forever addicted to reruns, regurgitation, remakes.

[Markku · Rating 4 out of 5]

First I thought he must be exaggerating but as I continued I had to admit that he really has a point - retro is everywhere even from beginning of the 70s and there is not much original in popular music after 1990s. Fortunately I am exactly of the same age as the writer, so I got to experience some of the original movements in person.

[Doug · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most of the book describes all the different musical genres and subgenres so most of the content is on music history rather than his idea that music is more about curating the past than creating new forms to explore. I wasn’t into the music history, and after reading the book I still can’t describe the difference between rock and rock’n’roll. The first couple of chapters and the last two chapters, where he actually looks at the big picture and combines music, pop culture, and technology, were really interesting, though. It’s a book that would have been an awesome article to read in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but a little tedious at 400 pages.

[Klaudija Grīnfelde · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Warning – a long review incoming.)

I’d like to provide a bit of context as to why I decided to read Retromania.

I love music of the past. I’ve loved it for quite a while now – I believe that the 7th or 8th grade marks the outset of my own so-called retromania. It had now gotten to the point where I realized I might be stuck in my own ways, therefore at the beginning of this year I resolved to be more patient and open-minded toward whatever music comes my way, even if it doesn’t come from my preferred musical decades and genres. And guess what – musically I’ve had a fantastic year with new discoveries and old reunions with stuff that had been collecting dust on my shelf. The lesson stuck – you have to get rid of your preconceptions to connect to new music (and not only music).

I decided to read Retromania to gain some outside perspective as to why I’ve clung to the music of the past so tightly. The title of the book suggested that I might not be the only one – turns out that the whole pop culture might be addicted to its own past. I wanted to know why.

The book turned out to be a much more detailed dissection of retromania than I had previously imagined. I expected to find out about retromania only from a musical aspect but the author provided a profound dissection of retromania as a global culture – record collecting, vintage clothing, band reunion tours, tribute albums, nostalgia, hauntology, revivalism, etc. Turns out that retromania has resided in our collective subconscious ever since the beginning of pop culture as we know it today. People have been longing for “the good old days” (even the immediate past) for a long time. On the one side, that’s quite a counterproductive way of thinking but, on the other, the past can be used to evaluate what’s absent in the present.

When it comes to comparing today and the past, Reynolds made some good points that I’d like to mention. Firstly, the innovation and surging forward. Each decade of the previous century provided new genres and cultural phenomenons, providing the feeling of constantly moving forward. The author believes that the 2000s was when music reached a plateau and, instead of creating new styles, started recycling and fusing genres that were already created before. Not to say that the 21st century has given us nothing but it’s difficult to deny that we’re not on the same page with, for example, the sixties, in terms of innovation. I find that quite understandable because after such a fast-paced journey of constant creation there has to be a point of exhaustion. Who knows, maybe the best is yet to come?

Secondly, in the analog era music didn’t require much discipline because discipline was given to you by the limitations of technology. Nowadays you have to artificially impose limitations because, as it is stated in the book, “otherwise you have limitlessness, and limitlessness is the opposite of freedom”. The rawness and sonic simplicity has always been one of the reasons why older music appeals to me so much. I believe that whenever we’re given new options and our limits are reduced, we become excessive (and that applies not only to music). The eighties, I believe, is a prime example of excess – when synthesizers appeared, musicians went bonkers with the use of synth. I recommend you listen to Modern Talking to get the idea. Don’t get me wrong, I love Modern Talking and synth was a great invention but I find it a bit funny how everyone just went all out pressing buttons and adding silly sound effects in every verse of the song.

Even though my initial intention behind reading Retromania was to understand my own retromania better, I realized that sometimes it’s unnecessary to psychoanalyze yourself and ask “why do I like this”. You just do. If you cling to something that you enjoy, it’s okay to stay there, however, if you open your mind and become more considerate towards something that you’ve regarded as foreign and maybe even unacceptable, you might end up discovering new stuff to love and hold very dear to you.

[Dominik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Retromania to projekt z rozmachem, który stara się jak może udowodnić swoją tezę; udaje się, choć nie bez potknięć. Zasadniczo książka dzieli się na trzy niewyróżnione, przeplatane ze sobą fragmenty: historię muzyki i jej kultury, interpretację osobistą oraz opisanie przy pomocy teorii.

Najgorsze są zdecydowanie te momenty, w których Reynolds po prostu przywołuje strona po stronie dzieje i bawi się w historyka rocka chwaląc się czytelnikowi swoimi horyzontami w zakresie wiedzy o niuansach i ciekawostkach o danych zespołach czy ruchach muzycznych. Najczęściej nie wnosi to zbyt wiele do wyjaśnienia zjawiska i jest banalnym show-offem, przeplatanym dodatkowo narracją osobistą: co się działo podczas studiów, co po urodzenia dziecka itd.; słowem, nie daje to absolutnie nic i jest męczące.
Interpretacja osobista jest o tyle ciekawa, że przekonująca - z opisu muzyki, subkultur i pomysłów muzyków autorowi udaje się dowieść swojej tezy niejednokrotnie poszerzając perspektywę w zakresie rozumienia muzyczno-historycznych momentów. Tutaj szeroka wiedza ma rzeczywiście zastosowanie i objętościowo to największa część książki.
Najmocniejsze (chyba też niestety najmniej liczne) są momenty, w których Reynolds nieśmiało buduje swoją teorię lub podkrada ją co nieco innym: nadal najlepszymi fragmentami pozostają chyba ten o kolekcjonerstwie i hauntologii, czyli te, które są podbudowane Baudrillardem, Benjaminem czy Derridą.

pisząc o przeszłości i stawiając tezę o repetetywności muzyki trudno nie wchodzić w figurę dziadka wspominającego z rozrzewnieniem dawne czasy, narzekającego, że dziś nie ma żadnej kreatywności. czasem zastanawiające jest to jakie zjawiska są wciągane w retromanię: czy jest nią film dokumentalny o Dylanie wydany w latach zerowych? czy jest nią dzisiejsza perspektywa na to, co mogło umknąć wcześniejszym słuchaczom i pokoleniom? czy wreszcie Reynolds nie pozwala sobie przez swój wiek i obrany zakres czasowy nie dostrzegać, że albo i dzisiaj pojawiają się rzeczy zupełnie nowe, albo wychwalane przez niego dekady powojenne same nie były ogarnięte zwrotem wstecz?

tu leży kolejny problem czasowy - książka ogarnia zakres 1950-2010, z czego, jak pisze autor pierwsza dekada XXI wieku nie potrafi stworzyć niczego nowego. musimy zadać sobie pytanie: czy rzeczywiście nic nie powstało, nawet w latach 10.? tak samo: czy Reynolds nie przeceni tej niesamowitej, czterdziestoletniej mocy do tworzenia nowego?
o ile zgadza się: dzisiejsza muzyka jest wielowątkową, multigatunkową syntezą (o czym był fajny rozdział o Flying Lotusie, YouTube i internetowym obiegu alternatywnym) tego, co było WCZEŚNIEJ, ale nie jest tworem pełnoprawnie teraźniejszym, stworzonym czysto od zera w teraźniejszości. ale czy taka była muzyka tamtych lat? rockabilly i rock nie są samoistnym wybuchem kreatywności, a pochodzą bezpośrednio z syntezy blues'a i country. nazywany tutaj freak folk czy nowy folk nie jest podkradziony z szczęśliwych lat 60. i beztroskiego, psychodelicznego plumkania, tylko z bluegrassa czy ogóle znowu blues'a. jeśli białe disco jest dzieckiem soulu i r'n'b to musi być zarazem wnukiem spiritualsów, big bandu i gospelu. w tym właśnie rzecz: jako że oddziela się grubą kreską całą muzykę przedwojenną, to zakłada się klapki na oczy na fakt, że muzyka nieustannie czerpie z siebie i "żyje swoją przeszłością" już od czasów blues'a (a i on ma przecież swoje źródła).

z drugiej strony przecież trudno się nie zgodzić z tezą Retromanii: w XXI wieku nie pojawił się żaden Kraftwerk, Beatelsi, Kinks, Black Sabbath, Velvet Underground ani Aphex Twin - coś, co byłoby pomimo swoich korzeni totalnie świeże, przedefiniowujące od podstaw to, jak słuchamy i jak tworzymy muzykę. pomimo tych problemów, to wciąż dzieło, które znakomicie pokazuje, że jesteśmy w dziwnym momencie kulturowego spowolnienia po bądź co bądź potężnie intensywnej drugiej dekadzie XX wieku. dlatego mimo tych wszystkich potknięć, dopóki nie wyrośnie nam nowa, definiująca generację tuza, to będzie to najpewniej najważniejsza książka muzyczna pierwszych dziesięcioleci nowej ery. choć może można trochę zaprzeczyć samej tezie życia własną przeszłością: może ten czas był po prostu nienaturalnym przyspieszeniem, które musimy dziś ogarnąć i uporządkować z dystansu. i może to okej.

[Serena Ramsey]

This asks a lot of questions and I think it mostly explores the questions further instead of explicitly answering them but that’s cool! Definitely extremely my shit.
Here’s the accompanying playlist as to be expected:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37H...

[Simon Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly brilliant but the 50 pages before the conclusion are a slog. It's also slightly depressing as it recounts the great things we are now going back to rather than experiencing afresh. Growing old is rubbish.

[Wilbert Herzog · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my youth i was reading Melody Maker, NME, Sounds, Rolling Stone and nearly every book i could get on the topic of Pop/Rock-Music. Sometimes i was reading so much about it that i got to make room for the books and mags; names like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Roy Carr, Ingeborg Schober or Franz Schöler were the writers who brought me to the right albums and artists. But after the 80s it seemed to me that the change of the music and the media in the 90s reduced the importance of the written critic, also the need for good music journalism. Music as a movement of culture (60s/70s/80s) was gone, so why should there be good music papers anymore ?

And now, so many years after, i bought this book - and it made wow,crash, boom, bang. There are still good writers in the music field of today (not here in the region where i live but in UK/US/Canada etc.), and Simon Reynolds is a true great one. He has written the (maybe) best book on the Punk/Wave-Era and now "Retromania". Music was always more to me then easy listening, more than just mere entertainment - i was fascinated by the social components, its influences on and from the world we live in, by the creation of all sounds, by the lyrics and meanings. I guess that my generation was always looking at music as the soundtrack of our lives (a feeling i find now again in Reynolds book).

Oh there are so many questions in this book, some explained well by Reynolds, others still open to discuss. He strives also topics like politics or fashion, he makes much philosophical views on the subject and tries to detect every aspect you could get on popular music. So, i for myself will think about this book maybe many years onwards, for now some conclusions for me are:

Retro can be creative/We are in a loop which always brings us back to the most innovative time popular music had (60s/70s/80s)/Retro can make musicians lazy in achieving own styles and forms of music/ Digital media brought the dominance of superficial listening and choosing to the music listener. And so on....

And my big thanks go to Reynolds because he brought me to insight views on parts of the music history i was not so familiar with (like Northern Soul, House Music, Rave etc). And also the possibilities of making your own music today with software and tools you can get.

[Hex75 · Rating 5 out of 5]

se qualcuno cerca qui il reynolds storico musicale di "post punk" o "energy flash" ha sbagliato libro: qui c'è il reynolds giornalista a prendere il controllo. e scrivo "giornalista" e non "giornalista musicale" perchè se è vero che la musica è l'argomento principale del libro la mentalità descritta è diffusa anche in altri ambiti. l'oggetto è lo stato della musica (sia dei musicisti, sia degli ascoltatori) adesso, il suo guardarsi continuamente indietro, l'ansia di "archiviare" tutto, il far riferimento -a volte in maniera indiretta, a volte in maniera più "subliminale"- a sonorità del passato. reynolds utilizza riferimenti a sociologi e filosofi, dimostrando di avere un'apertura mentale enorme, e non si preoccupa di contraddire persino se stesso e il suo essere un "archivista musicale": è un libro estremamente scorrevole (che l'autore sappia scrivere non è una novità) ma proprio per i suoi riferimenti anche profondo, e non certo facilissimo. ma per un certo tipo di ascoltatore/collezionista (come il sottoscritto) è una lettura fondamentale: costringe a ripensare il proprio approccio con la musica senza cambiarlo, spinge a porsi delle domande serie su quello che si ascolta senza per forza rinnegarlo, e per un libro così non credo ci sia risultato migliore.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought provoking and trivia-studded exploration of retro culture from Simon Reynolds, who I'd count as one of the most intelligent and considered music writers. I mean intelligent without descending into the florid, convoluted self-indulgence that makes some music writers borderline unintelligible. Naming no names (PAUL MORLEY cough cough).

Occasionally this was very smart, but it peaked with the prologue and intro and was a bit conflicted thereafter. This End Of Dayz mentality that assumes no-one's creating anything new any more: I call bullshit on this pining for a time gone by when no-one pined for a time gone by. This very book describes loads of examples of retro fascination from the "creative" decades of the 60s and 70s. Nothing is created in a vacuum.

He is right that we're living through a period of mashing styles from different recent decades together, but this is in itself a style, and one which will become passe at some point, as is the fate of all things.

Not as good as Rip It Up and Start Again.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite music writer puts his thoughts on shuffle. I don't feel, when I read simon Reynolds, as if I'm reading grand pronouncements, but rather just theories and thoughts and conversation starters.

And I learn more about music than I could have ever imagined.

[Kate Sherrod · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not 100% convinced by Reynolds' arguments. He makes the case that pop has been eating itself perfectly well, but he didn't convince me it's bad. This was, however, a great history lesson, and I discovered some new-to-me music, so it gets back one of the stars it would have otherwise lost 8)

[Benedetta Ventrella (rienva) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il libro di musica più bello e stimolante che io abbia mai letto.
Simon Reynolds ha una visione ampia, una passione che trasmette sinceramente, fa critica culturale e filosofia restando un eccellente divulgatore.
Libro eccezionale.

[Dinu Guţu · Rating 5 out of 5]

cartea nu e rea, da n-ai nevoie de 450 de pagini cu multe argumente sterile si in aer ca sa zici doua ideii despre pop. fata de Energy flash e slaba. 2,5 stelute din partea noastra.

[Steven Poore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hidden between the lines of this argument that pop culture has indeed eaten itself is a man suffering from an existential midlife crisis. Simon Reynolds craves a hit of the New, and believes that modern music looks far more to the past than to the future. To demonstrate this he examines the trends, movements and cultural flows of the past fifty years before arguing that today's music has become nothing more than a self-referential melting pot of what has gone before, with no hope of real evolution. Technological advances mean that the past exists in the same space as the present and the fact that there's so much more of it is dragging culture back like the event horizon of a black hole. We gotta get out of this place, he says.

Reynolds is deeply conflicted: on the one hand Retromania is lovingly researched and argued in the chapters that deal with the past. Hardly surprising, as Reynolds grew up through the 70s and 80s, and cut his teeth on the tail end of the 60s. He's bound to identify heavily with the music from those eras, even if he does sneer at it through his prose (he's not keen on Northern Soul for example, but to be honest who can blame him?). On the other hand, he's scrabbling around for the Thrill of the New, desperate to find something that makes him feel the way he did when he first heard Remain In Light, Acid Trax, or Computer World. Like a pretentiously cutting edge assistant manager at HMV, Reynolds' references seem to deliberately avoid the mainstream, focusing his enthusiams on sub-sub-genres such as "hauntology", where voices from the past are cut and sampled in freakish and distorted ways. Interesting, perhaps, but hardly *new*.

Music since 1963 (coincidentally the birth year of both the Beatles' career and Reynolds himself) has been forward-looking and thrilling, but increasingly less so since the mid-90s, he says. But his theory that this slowdown is due mainly to technological advancements falls foul of the fact that rock'n'roll itself forced itself into the cultural mainstream through technological advancements. *Electric* guitars. Elvis on *TV*. Without electricity itself, we'd still be clapping along to a medley of Mrs Brown's Greatest hits at the Gleadless Music Hall.

It feels like Reynolds wants punk all over again, and can't see it anywhere on the horizon. Not that punk itself was all that forward-looking - Sid Vicious descended into cabaret; most of the actual music blended into one belligerent OI. But perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be. In the 12 years since Retromania was first published (yes, it's been sat on my shelves since 2013, I refuse to be judged), pop culture has left me behind as much as I've left it. There's plenty of new, *young* music that goes over my head, and that doesn't trouble me at all. I don't feel the need to chase that Shock Of The New, just as those who were 50 in 1977 probably didn't feel the need to chase the Shock Of The New back then either.

"It's about new forms, not new faces," Reynolds concludes. "It's the same scary-euphoric rush that the best science fiction gives: the vertigo of limitlessness." But you can't force that rush into existence. If you try, this is what you end up with:

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania attempts to make sense of the nostalgia complex within contemporary music. Released in 2011, from our heady vantage point of 2021 the book comes across as both ahead of its time and premature. The aftershock (or more fittingly ‘lethargy’) of stagnation that gripped the 2000s so tightly can still be felt to this day. I myself went into the book expecting a survey of the first decade of the 21st Century, an attempt to diagnose its ills, and maybe some tentative hints at a way out of this mire.

And in part one function of Retromania is precisely that. For elder millennials who experienced adolescence in the 2000s, the book touches on many aspects of this decade that will resonate deeply. Where was our summer of love? Where was our punk moment? Where was our cataclysmic reckoning with the status quo?

Alumni of this period are not short on anecdotes and theories as to why this period marks a distinctive break with history. I remember reading copies of NME from this era celebrating the “New Rock Revolution” – namely bands like The Hives, The Vines, The Datsuns, The White Stripes – that offered anything but a revolution: a perfect replica of the past. Urgent causes and cataclysmic world events were not in short supply, and all demanded a meaningful cultural response that went unmet. 9/11, the Iraq War, economic collapse, all happened on our watch and all received no lasting musical legacy beyond that Greenday album.

Reynolds is not short on theories of his own. The internet offers unprecedented access to history. The sheer volume and stockpiling of past cultures disincentives the search for the new. The exponential progress of technology has shifted the focus away from the content of culture to the means of its transmission.

But as the book unfolds it becomes far more than an “everything’s shit now” stink piece. This is no mere indictment of 21st Century pop culture. Instead it seeks to subject pop culture to the longer lens usually reserved for serious historical analysis, and uses this to assess movements over decades and cross-generational trends. Where does pop fit within broader historical currents? Can pop culture be used to take the temperature of Western nations as compared to say the Global South or the Far East? It’s an ambitious work that leaves many arguments open ended, implicitly encouraging readers to pick up the various threads and apply them to their own relationship with the zeitgeist.

The book makes a point of calling attention to facets of contemporary music culture that go largely unnoticed by younger readers born in the late 80s onwards. Elements of music journalism such as artists broadcasting their influences (both in interviews and in the music itself), or constructing music criticism around a list historical reference points found in new releases; these are called out by Reynolds as uniquely new phenomena, yet are considered part of the furniture for today’s music journalism.

The documentation, classification, and archiving of record collections as facilitated by the Ipod (and later by Spotify) feed pre-existing complexes for serious music fans, yet allow us to take this collector mentality to the extreme, gorging ourselves on content leaving metrics of quality as merely an afterthought. And with the advent of sites like Discogs and Rate Your Music, Reynolds argues that a new type of passive fandom has been normalised. We have gone from militant revolutionists and philosophers of the “new”, to passive curators, monks carefully documenting all of recorded music history for posterity.

The book takes some deeper dives back in time. It offers a whistle stop history of post war contemporary music from the perspective of the "retro" mentality. Reynolds discovers the nostalgia complex in more obvious culprits such as Northern Soul and the Mod Revival of the late 1970s, to illuminating the 50s revivalism championed by Malcom McClaren in the run up to the punk explosion, or 20s jazz revivalists of the post war period. Reynolds contrasts these with select pivotal moments in history where all sense of past was lost, and the relentless appetite of the present “annexing” the future gave rise to movements too intense to last more than a few years. Late 60s psychedelia, the 1977 punk “moment”, and British rave of the early 1990s are all singled out for special mention.

Many of the themes unwrapped in Retromania arguably apply more today than ever before. Listing off the facets of modern music fandom that the book put under the microscope ten years ago, it’s clear how little these things have changed, and arguably intensified throughout the 2010s. The idea that musical innovation now amounts to tweaking at experimental and left-field styles rather than radically redrawing the musical landscape rings particularly true, the collector/curator mentality, file sharing, streaming, recording tech itself, mash-ups, sampling, the maligned hipster as a rootless amalgamation of various cultural reference points, and many more.

But underlying it all is the sense that we have lost our sense of a collective future. The longstanding "where's my jet-pack" cliche illustrates a more sombre malaise. The idea that we are bounding forward together into a better tomorrow exists only as a quaint throwback. The tech is there, in medicine, computing, smartphones, and myriad other ways. But the visible, grand scale visions of utopian city planners, enriched public spaces, the shared sense of humanity striving forward into a future we all have a stake in has been swept away by atomisation. You could point to a plethora of reasons for this, climate change and the unchecked extension of free market dogmas into the public realm being the most obvious.

Yet Reynolds holds out hope that these trends are not irreversible, and may in fact reach a tipping point when we run out of past to revive. This is an idea that takes on a new prescience in 2021. One can only speculate as to the cultural ramifications of lockdown, and the response of the next generation when music scenes are allowed to see the light of day after their long hibernation.

[Justin Morlock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easily my favourite nonfiction read this year, highly recommend for anyone interested in these sorts of topics within music history and their connection to culture and society at large. Occasionally (especially in the middle third) veers into repetitive appraisals of specific artists and moments which lost me a bit but I loved the broader cultural survey and analysis of how music history and other artistic trends reflect the collective optimism or, more topically, our lack of positive visions of the future. I'm not the target demographic for hauntology in its most specific musical sense but the wider application of it and similar movements is such a compelling perspective and tool for understanding the present moment, that "post-2000 hangover" where my childhood was filled with a sense that we (my generation) were bound for great things and find our hopes for the internet and 21st-century society co-opted and corrupted by capitalism. If it's impossible to imagine a future beyond capitalism, how can we expect to envision a new era of exciting, revolutionary, generation-defining music? Of course we keep turning to the past instead of the future that never came for inspiration.

Really wish I could go ask Simon Reynolds how he thinks about these topics nowadays after things have largely gotten ✨worse✨ since 2011.

[natnanananannasai · Rating 4 out of 5]

jest to wspaniała i pasjonująca książka, której nie chce mi się kończyć – Reynolds jest jednak (i jest tego totalnie świadomym) trochę wujkiem, który ma przymus wszystko opowiedzieć, wszystko odnotować, skatalogować, wspomnieć. jest to na dłuższą metę męczące, choć sam wywód jest świetny, tyle anegdotki ile trzeba, tyle przypisów i humanistycznej teorii, ile naprawdę jest niezbędne do przemyślenia czegoś