Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past - Softcover

Reynolds, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571232086 ISBN 13: 9780571232086

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011

Synopsis

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 cultural-ecological 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?

About this title

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

Book Description

Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is . . . its past?

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571232086
• ISBN 13: 9780571232086
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496