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.

Rather than sticking to the predictable and endlessly covered, Simon Reynolds tends to bring genuine insight to some lesser-covered areas of modern music. Having read and loved 'Rip It Up and Start Again', I couldn't have been happier to see him writing about something that I've been obsessed about recently - the future I expected as a youth that never happened.
I have to admit that the sections on record collecting left me a bit cold, but when he gets onto the subject of hauntology, the nostalgia for futurism and the parallels between the state of music and the wider economy, Reynolds is completely on song.
As a child I devoured the optimistic (and not so optimistic) visions of the future that abounded in my 70s and 80s childhood and have often wondered about when and why we went from looking forward to looking back - as a teenage car nut in particular I noticed the transition from the forward-looking designs of the 70s to the advent of 'retro'. Now I find myself listening to music that harks back to childhood memories - the aforementioned hauntology and bands like Epic45 that have been described as 'psychogeographic' - fantastic music, all - but I wonder what my motivation is. Why does much of the new development that we have seen in the past decade or so, in the physical, political or cultural, seem so soulless, so manufactured, so calculated that it leads us to hark back to a past either real or imagined?
I've reached my own conclusions on the subject - that the triumph of consumer capitalism has led to an all-pervasive short-termism and conservatism, safe, market/focus-group driven evolution rather than innovation. In the all-consuming pursuit of profit, it is safer to give people more of what they want now in shinier and more friendly forms, rather than looking at what they might need in the future. Of course what we see in the economy is reflected in wider culture and vice-versa. In addition, an economic boom and a media's reliance on production of fear and paranoia to sustain itself, I believe has led to the cul-de-sac we have found ourselves in, where looking back has become a comfort and indulgence.
An interesting angle that Reynolds brings up is the progression in both our economy and culture to 'post-production' - something I found myself nodding vigorously to.
It's easy to dismiss all of this as the moaning of ageing men, but never has choice been so abundant, the past so accessible or the influence of shallow consumerism so apparent and I think that this book is just the start of the many questions that need asking.

If you can put aside this book as being a thesis and think of it more as a one-sided argument with some bloke (albeit a well informed, verbose and well educated bloke) in the pub, it is actually a very good read.

OK, so it drags in places and could have probably lost 20% without damaging the argument but Simon Reynolds does make a very good point and that is, essentially, can you name a single track from the past 12 years that would have seemed out of place, beyond comprehension, in the '90's? I could perhaps argue a case for people like Skrillex, but then Reynolds would counter whether it's truly new music or is it a logical follow on to the real game changer which was early 90's rave? And has Skrillex and his dubstep contempories started a teenage movement that's infultrated fashion and language? That's why it's an argument and no so much a thesis - yes Retromania can be flawed and you don't have to agree with everything Reynolds says, but he does make a very, very good point.

Without a shadow the noughties will go down in history as the first decade of popular music, dating all the way back to the jazz age, where the technology (ipod, Youtube) were the real stars, the revolutionaries that changed everything - not the Beatles, Bowie or Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk or Grandmaster Flash. As Reynolds points out, the musical difference between the years, say 1978 to '79 or 1991 to '92 were immense but did 2004 feel any different to 1998, or 2010? Not really.

Has music stopped progressing because we favour its past? If we do, is it because there is now such a wealth of historic creativity to draw from, to inspire us, and that ocean of reference is available to everyone on itunes, Youtube or illegal download at the instant click of a button, so why do we need to keep looking forward? And even if we want to, how do we escape this omnipresent past? Do we want to live dangerously anymore? It's not in Reynold's book but perhaps a quick look at the UK's top 10 selling singles of the 2000's can go a long way to answer some of his questions: Number one - Evergreen by Will Young, two - Unchained Melody by Gareth Gates, three - Is This The Way To Amarillo? by Tony Christie. Two more of the top 10 are cover versions, and a further two TV talent show winners. Music as pure showbiz rather than heartfelt rebellion. Is this how pop will die?