- Paperback: 496 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (2 Jun 2011)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571232086
- ISBN-13: 978-0571232086
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.4 x 3.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 134,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past
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Review
Retromania is a terrific book. Reynolds brings profound knowledge and oceanic depth and width to his argument, tracing his theme from trad jazz through the 70s rock and roll boom to the hipsterism of today, via the hyper-connectedness and infinite jukebox of the web. Unlike many of the pop writers who inspired him as a youth, he deploys his high intelligence and vast range of reference lucidly, to argue and illuminate, not dazzle or alienate. --Steve Yates, Word magazine
Reynolds's mapping of today s pop environment is often witty; his account of the way in which so many artists position themselves as curators is spot-on, as is his description of internet users himself included gorging on illegal downloads. His prose, casually neologistic and making deft use of sci-fi tropes, is bracingly sharp. As a work of contemporary historiography, a thick description of the transformations in our relationship to time as well as to place Retromania deserves to be very widely read. --Sukhdev Sandhu, Observer
Looking back at the last 25 years you'd be hard pressed to name a music journalist more adept at tracking and defining a zeitgeist. --Dave Haslam, Guardian
In this immensely engaging new work, (Reynolds) looks at 'retromania' as it applices to music. He hits us with a wealth of statistics about reissue and reformation culture, which should be enough to give anyone an interest in progressive music a panic attack ... This is an essential read for anyone who realises that it is history, not piracy, that poses the greatest threat to the progress of popular music. -- John Doran, The Stool Pigeon
If anyone can make sense of pop music's steady mutation from what George Melly noted as its 'worship of the present', to its current status as a living heritage industry where past, present and what the author calls a nostalgia for a lost future co-exist, then you'd have to trust Reynolds. He's a top-table critic whose keen ear is matched by a sharp eye for cultural context. - **** Mark Paytress, Mojo
A meticulous and fascinating survey of the evolution of pop's infrastructure of mis-remembering, from trad-jazz to rave nostalgia via reggae reissue labels, northern soul and, surprisingly, Patti Smith's Horses. - --Ben Thompson, Independent on Sunday
A restless, omnivorous intellectual, Reynolds roams far and wide to investigate, formulate and test what is, essentially, a kind of vague hunch, bringing in critical theory, politics and history. Reynolds has a snappy turn of phrase, inventing terms such as franticity to describe the neurological pulse of the wired life and labelling the limitless internet archive the anarchive . -- Neil McCormick, Daily Telegraph
'In Retromania, Simon Reynolds, one of our most thoughtful music writers, poses a stark question for anyone who cares about the future of pop: has it become so obsessed with its own past that originality and invention are now beyond its reach?' -- Patrick Sawer, Sunday Telegraph
As 20th-century listening habits give way to those of the 21st, this book offers a timely response to a decisive moment in the development of pop music production and raises concerns that are not easily dismissed. Serious music fans and music-makers alike should read it not just for its striking presentation of pop's history and teleology, but for its informed and passionate challenge to a burgeoning zeitgeist. --Adam Harper, Oxonian Review
Reynolds's mapping of today s pop environment is often witty; his account of the way in which so many artists position themselves as curators is spot-on, as is his description of internet users himself included gorging on illegal downloads. His prose, casually neologistic and making deft use of sci-fi tropes, is bracingly sharp. As a work of contemporary historiography, a thick description of the transformations in our relationship to time as well as to place Retromania deserves to be very widely read. --Sukhdev Sandhu, Observer
Looking back at the last 25 years you'd be hard pressed to name a music journalist more adept at tracking and defining a zeitgeist. --Dave Haslam, Guardian
In this immensely engaging new work, (Reynolds) looks at 'retromania' as it applices to music. He hits us with a wealth of statistics about reissue and reformation culture, which should be enough to give anyone an interest in progressive music a panic attack ... This is an essential read for anyone who realises that it is history, not piracy, that poses the greatest threat to the progress of popular music. -- John Doran, The Stool Pigeon
If anyone can make sense of pop music's steady mutation from what George Melly noted as its 'worship of the present', to its current status as a living heritage industry where past, present and what the author calls a nostalgia for a lost future co-exist, then you'd have to trust Reynolds. He's a top-table critic whose keen ear is matched by a sharp eye for cultural context. - **** Mark Paytress, Mojo
A meticulous and fascinating survey of the evolution of pop's infrastructure of mis-remembering, from trad-jazz to rave nostalgia via reggae reissue labels, northern soul and, surprisingly, Patti Smith's Horses. - --Ben Thompson, Independent on Sunday
A restless, omnivorous intellectual, Reynolds roams far and wide to investigate, formulate and test what is, essentially, a kind of vague hunch, bringing in critical theory, politics and history. Reynolds has a snappy turn of phrase, inventing terms such as franticity to describe the neurological pulse of the wired life and labelling the limitless internet archive the anarchive . -- Neil McCormick, Daily Telegraph
'In Retromania, Simon Reynolds, one of our most thoughtful music writers, poses a stark question for anyone who cares about the future of pop: has it become so obsessed with its own past that originality and invention are now beyond its reach?' -- Patrick Sawer, Sunday Telegraph
As 20th-century listening habits give way to those of the 21st, this book offers a timely response to a decisive moment in the development of pop music production and raises concerns that are not easily dismissed. Serious music fans and music-makers alike should read it not just for its striking presentation of pop's history and teleology, but for its informed and passionate challenge to a burgeoning zeitgeist. --Adam Harper, Oxonian Review
Book Description
Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is . . . its past?
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Looking forward to the past,
By
This review is from: Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past (Paperback)
Reynold's book explores an essential issue for anyone interested in popular music. In fact, it's an issue for our society in general; are we already living in the "future" and just endlessly recycling the past. Or maybe it's just that boring old farts like myself and Simon Reynolds see the last 10-15 years of music as lacking any direction and originality? This is a very interesting read but I resist giving it a 5 (or should that be 11?) for several reasons. Firstly he does tend to meander off into areas of music history that interest him, which at times distracts from the central issue of the book. Do we need quite so many examples of the way in which the musical past is being recycled to get the point. I like the idea that things started to go sour in the mid 1960s, but it could be said that the idea of endless novelty in music or any other art form is relatively recent. e.g. until the 20th century architects were quite happy to recycle Greek and Roman styles. Perhaps the novel and the cool cultures of the post WW2 era are just an anomaly? At the same time, pop music is not unique in recycling and reusing the past as a source for new movements and styles. If I were to get all Hegelian I'd say that all novelty is a synthesis of past ideas (theses): r and b, jazz and blues did not just drop from the sky, but were themselves syntheses of earlier styles/types of music.These criticism's aside, I hope, as Bruce Sterling claims, that the era of atemporality is only temporary (?!). Reynold's book prompts me to wonder if the future might *have* a future after all, and hence it's well worth reading.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wake-up call.,
By
This review is from: Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past (Paperback)
Dismissed in some quarters as a groan stemming from a mid-life crisis, Reynolds does in fact point out what others lack the courage to point out - that pop/rock has for some time failed to move forward and has become little more than a cannibaliser of its own history. Reynolds does this with considerable aplomb, trawling over a wide range of popular music forms while tipping his hat to a number of theorists. Having taken the view that pop/rock stopped progressing once punk came on the scene, Reynolds shows this not to have been the case. On this score alone, the book was of some benefit to me and I look forward to reading his earlier book on post-punk. One absence I noticed in the book was any sustained examination of music professionals - music writers, radio DJ's and so on - and their silence about Reynolds' core issue. It strikes me that vested interests prevent them from owning up to the obvious: that if someone's 'record of the week' sounds like it was recorded 40 years ago, we have a problem. Paul Jones continues to play blues records that show absolutely no development/extension of the form; Mojo and Uncut (mentioned briefly by Reynolds) function as curators rather than - as with the old NME - cutting edge promulgators of the new; and most reviews of 'new' music are unable to resist comparisons with other bands. Yet, no-one says bugger all about it, or not publicly. It's to Reynolds credit that he has. An important book and a compelling read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fine insights from a great music writer,
By
This review is from: Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past (Paperback)
The great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk is famous for having dismissed the very idea of music journalism and criticism with the remark "writing about music is like dancing about architecture."If any music writer of the last twenty years has disproved this somewhat blinkered comment it is Simon Reynolds. Previously he has written with great panache about rave music and post-punk. And now with his latest book he turns his attention to the ways in which popular culture, music in particular, has for some time been voraciously feeding on its own past rather than trying to look ahead to the future. Reynolds writes lucidly and penetratingly. Many of his insights make for compelling reading, particularly the chapter about the coming of the ipod and what that gadget has done to our appreciation of music. I stayed up half the night reading this section despite wanting desperately to go to sleep - you know you've found a good book when you start looking for matches to prop your eyes open so you can go on reading. The passages where he describes the ever accumulating racks of unwanted musical garbage in charity shops had me laughing out loud. And the chapters on garage punk and the phenonmenon of 'hauntology' (strange British and American electronic indie acts stitching bizarre music together out of esoteric musical odds and ends from their collective childhoods) were both insightful and intriguing - they both caused me to go scurrying off to Amazon to make some suddenly vital CD purchases. The final chapter, in which Reynolds daringly draws parallels between the current parlous state of the world econonmy and the state of popular culture and music, is highly fascinating - although I am not enough of an economist or academic cultural theorist to be able to assess how much legitimate intellectual weight there is in his argument. But make no mistake, this is not intended to be some dry academic treatise - this is great, though provoking, popular music journalism shot through with tremendous soul, insight and passion. If you only buy one music book in the next five years, make it this one.
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