Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

Published Jan. 28, 2011 by Faber & Faber.

ISBN:: 978-0-86547-994-4
OCLC Number:: 741311712

(1 review)

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 …

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?

1 edition

AvonVilla reviewed Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds

No Future for Us

5 stars

It's another must-read masterwork from Reynolds, who gives us a vast survey of popular music, charting the quantity and quality of its cannibalism over the decades, and assessing the extreme levels of self-devouring reached by 2011. In the decade plus since the book's publication, not much has changed.

I have my own take on the subject of this book. I imagine a post-war "tabula rasa". If you were born in, say, 1930, you would have been 15 at the end of the Second World War. In 1945 it was like the end of the old world, which had basically destroyed itself.

Normally when you are around the age of 15 you are ready to start soaking up the rich sweet syrup of culture, but in 1945 it was all gone, wiped out or rendered meaningless by years of fascist dictatorship and the all-consuming allied campaign to destroy it.

For about …

It's another must-read masterwork from Reynolds, who gives us a vast survey of popular music, charting the quantity and quality of its cannibalism over the decades, and assessing the extreme levels of self-devouring reached by 2011. In the decade plus since the book's publication, not much has changed.

I have my own take on the subject of this book. I imagine a post-war "tabula rasa". If you were born in, say, 1930, you would have been 15 at the end of the Second World War. In 1945 it was like the end of the old world, which had basically destroyed itself.

Normally when you are around the age of 15 you are ready to start soaking up the rich sweet syrup of culture, but in 1945 it was all gone, wiped out or rendered meaningless by years of fascist dictatorship and the all-consuming allied campaign to destroy it.

For about a decade after 1945 we had a kind of writer's block, where the blank slate was a psychological barrier to creation. In the 1950s, enough people began to see the blank page as a clean, perfect invitation to start creating. It was a release, an outpouring, after a build-up of pressure. This was why we fought that war: to be free.

Post-war modernity began with rock and roll in the 1950s. The engine sputtered briefly before kicking into life and reaching maximum speed in the 1960s. For the next 30 years or so it was a febrile time of creation, filling up the blank page, constantly looking for a space on that page to colour in, as soon as we could conceive something new to express and cover that intolerable blankness.

That was how I viewed pop and rock music as I grew up. The Beatles were my centre of gravity. Through their cover versions (Little Richard, Chuck Berry) I gained a foothold into the music of the 50s, discovering the big bang of rock and roll even though I was born in 1962. In the 60s, 70s and 80s the flame of originality burned brightly, but in the 90s, its intensity began to fade. That was when the remix, the rehash, the revival assumed a greater status than the revolution. The new and the unprecedented were eclipsed by the repeat. The blank page was all filled in.

The internet promised something new, but instead it became a sort of zombie apocalypse. Technology's boundless online capacity was able to revive all the old stuff. The medium was no longer the message: the past had taken control of the medium, and imposed a new temporal order where the expressions of the present and even the future were suppressed.

Reynolds explores the history of revivals. His research and his insights are impeccable. I loved reading about the earliest retromaniacs, the jazz freaks who thought music went downhill after 1933. I am a fan of Robert Crumb, and he has graphically expressed his commitment to this concept. There was another rebellion against modern jazz. Instead of the expressive, experimental Coltrane stuff, the 50s jazz retromaniacs insisted on the New Orleans tradition, a revival cult abbreviated to "trad jazz". It had a surge of popularity in the 1950s, prompting some of its proponents to "sell out". It was like a Ray Harryhausen stop motion animation, a battle between dinosaurs. Soon a meteor called The Beatles would wipe them all out. There are plenty more revivals from subsequent decades lovingly analysed in this great book.

Fast forward to the present, and Reynolds still believes in the future, still believes something huge will come along to repeat the thrills of the summer of love, punk and rave. My fear is that it will only happen with a cataclysm like world war 2... except this time it would be world war 3. There'll be no blank page, because there will be no page at all. I'd rather have the stagnation of retromania, thank you very much.