Retromania (Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past) by Simon Reynolds is a brilliant and perceptive study which the author describes as “an investigation – not just of the hows and whys of retro as a culture and an industry but also of the larger issues to do with living in, living off and living with the past”.
While he writes about wider cultural trends, he is at his most passionate (and knowledgeable) when writing about music. This book confirms him as the most perceptive and articulate rock critic since Greil Marcus.
At one point he muses: “Maybe we need to forget. Maybe forgetting is as essential for a culture as it is existentially and emotionally necessary for individuals” but in his heart of hearts he knows full well that this never likely to happen.
The impulse to revisit high points in your life is hard to resist and the means to do so have never been easier. If you get nostalgic for a kids TV show theme, for instance, you can find it after a few minutes surfing. Not only that, but you can often find complete episodes of shows you had all but forgotten about.
The fact that we have such resources at our disposal online largely accounts for why our obsession with the immediate past has never been greater.
Added to this is a general insecurity about the present and uncertainties/fears about what the future might hold. As Reynolds writes: “in a destabilised world, ideas of durable tradition and folk memory start to appeal as a counterweight and a drag in the face of capitalism’s reckless and wrecking radicalism”.
Reynolds is a self-confessed record-geek and book-nerd (particularly Sci-Fi). He was born in 1963 and his adolescence coincided with the advent of Post-Punk. Later, he became a huge fan of the Rave Scene. He has covered these topics extensively in his previous books.
Simon Reynolds
Retromania is a more personal and wide-ranging book peppered with autobiographical asides about growing up, moving to America (he now lives in LA) and becoming a Dad. It documents his insatiable hunger for new cultural experience, something that means that the book is not just the work of someone harking back to a golden age.
He certainly doesn’t look down on ‘retromaniacs’ and even admits to being one himself. There is, for example, a nostalgia for his time as an avid record collector back when music was a more tangible ‘thing’ than it is now. These days, particularly for the ‘connected’ generation, music is often treated more as information than something to have and hold.
His current favourite music mostly falls into the category of Hypnagogic Pop and Hauntology (e.g. Ariel Pink, Ghost Box, Flying Lotus, Gonjasufi) but while he praises these sounds he recognises that none of it feels truly new.
Past decades threw up many new genres : beat-pop, psychedelia, ska, folk-rock in the 60s; glam, heavy metal, punk, funk and reggae in the 70s; synth-pop, Goth, house music in the 80s; rave and grunge in the 90s. The noughties and beyond is defined more by rapid changes in technology and social networking than any true musical innovation.
Reynolds has not lost the knack of inventing smart terms to summarise trends. This, after all, is the man credited with coining the genre term ‘Post-Rock’. In Retromania he talks of “ecstatic regression” offered by You Tube. Gang Gang Dance’s latest album Glass Jar opens with the spoken words : “I can hear everything – it’s everything time” ; with You Tube (and elsewhere), its easy to believe that we can hear AND see everything.
An even better label is “hyper-stasis” which sums up what he feels is the fundamental problem of retro-ism. The massive and seemingly limitless vaults of information being available at the click of the mouse means that the vibrant forward-looking nature of culture has stagnated. This leads to what Cyberpunk author William Gibson calls “future fatigue” with the consequence that there seems to be a general loss of cultural appetite. The state we’re in is summed up succinctly in the closing chapter:
“In the analogue era, everyday life moved slowly (you had to wait for news, and for new releases) but the culture as a whole felt like it was surging forward. In the digital present, everyday life consists of hyper-acceleration and near-instantaneity (downloading, web pages constantly being refreshed, the impatient skimming of text on screens), but on the macro-cultural level things feel static and stalled. We have the paradoxical combination of speed and standstill”.
Retromania is a timely and important book which is a ‘must-read’ for culture vultures past, present and, maybe, future.
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I have a difficult relationship with this novel.
This eloquent, ambitious, challenging and, ultimately, fascinating book was conceived in part as “a diminished non-fiction mirror” of Italo Calvino’s Le Città Invisibili (Invisible Cities).
