Retromania: Pop culture's Addiction to its Own Past. (New Simon Reynolds book).

the past becomes "the past" culturally much faster now than ever before

Also, sorry, assuming I'm understanding it, this just seems so wrong to me. When American Graffiti came out in 1973, the pop era it covered -- it was set in 1962, but concentrated on music of the late '50s -- seemed like it could have been centuries ago, almost. In contrast, I honestly don't get how pop music has fundamentally changed anywhere near that much since 2001, or the late '90s. It's not even close. But maybe that's a function of me following music much closer now than I did between 1962 and 1973. Or maybe it's just a function of age, who knows. What I'm fairly sure about is that kids growing up now do not find music of the '90s (or even '70s!) anywhere near as quaint or antique as say, kids of the '70s would have found music of the '50s.

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xp

That is an interesting point, and I think that is specifically up to the rupture of the late 60s. An example I like to use is the live recording of VU's "Sister Ray" from the 1967 Gymnasium bootleg; that was 10 years after "Jailhouse Rock", or the same length of time from 2001 until now. And I honesty think very few people alive in 1957 could have even imagined that music existing in 10 years. It's hard to think of anything going on now that was unimaginable 10 years ago (pretty sure there is a thread that speculates on just this somewhere).

xhuxk, Tim was responding to talk of much earlier, pre- mass media periods of time. I think the "now" Tim was talking about would include the whole era of mass media (or at least some point after it got rolling).

(I agree with your perception that the 50s seeming a lot more distant in the 70s than the 70s did in the 90s, or now even.)

I guess I'm interested in aspects of this thread after all. Maybe I should read the book.

Yes, I was trying to get at why centuries of people playing the same folk tunes does not mean that "retromania" has always existed in the way it exists now. The "culture becomes the past faster now" refers to the 20th century onwards in general, not the immediate recent past of pop culture.

It's harder to say whether cultural progression has started to slow down (say, in the last ten years) because those immediate judgments are much more tied up in one's own relationship to culture, aging etc.

Yes, I was trying to get at why centuries of people playing the same folk tunes does not mean that "retromania" has always existed in the way it exists now. The "culture becomes the past faster now" refers to the 20th century onwards in general, not the immediate recent past of pop culture

I can see why this is a seductive argument but I'm not overly convinced by this. Surely this could only really be compared another 100-200 years down the line. 1940-2040 might look at lot more homogeneous in 2190 than it does today.

It's less about homogeneity or lack thereof and more about the way in which people relate to their immediate past. From the limited amount I know, the 19th century strikes me as being as much a time of flux as the 20th, but I'm not aware of people in the 19th century reviving trends mere decades old for the specific purpose of recalling/resurrecting the trends of that prior decade.

and that's basically cuzza technology. why people do it now and didn't do it then. though i'm sure there were always mini-movements of people resurrecting or re-appreciating composers and songwriters of the recent past back then too.

yes, absolutely.

i think the Victorians probably had a much stronger ethos of "progress" than we do in the post-everything 21st century too, but if my brain was less fuddled i'm sure i could come up with good examples of 19th century micro-nostalgia

i'm also guessing that in the 19th century (and earlier) a piece of music that was 20 or 30 years old could be considered pretty current! i mean, unless you had access to the sheet music or were lucky enough to hear a performance of something new, it might be years before you came into contact with some stuff.

I think what Scott argues about Collins 'You Can't Hurry Love' being a modern cover is interesting and i guess it's a situation where personal prejudices are brought out. my first thought was to compare its modernity to other big hit covers from around the same time e.g. Siouxsie & The Banshees 'Dear Prudence'. The latter was more unusual but not necessarily more contemporary-sounding despite the band's position (but tbh I don't know the reasons why they covered and released that song at that time).

one example in the united states of some sort of retro-mania was the huge popularity of stephen foster in the years after his death. (i mean he died penniless on the bowery in the 1860's, and by the turn of the century those songs were literally everywhere and he was a national treasure. not that his songs weren't known when he was alive, but his posthumous fame reflects the desire for that down home/minstrel/old south nostalgia that was really strong well into the 20th century)

i love siouxie's cover. and i love her covers album. that whole thing is a great updating of old songs. might have been the first time i ever heard "this wheel's on fire"!

that was the acid talking though, right? her and bob smith tripping and making acid rock. i know i had a couple of summers of love listening to The Top and Hyaena.

burning from the inside by bauhaus was one of my favorite albums to listen to when i was on acid back then. and tones on tail too.

so many 60's vibes in the 80's! and for me it all started with that doors rennaisance in the early 80's. Doors-mania!

i used to make mix tapes for me and my friends back then for when we were high and it would be like: husker du/jefferson airplane/love & rockets/the grateful dead/the cure/hot tuna/etc. good times.

I think in every era artists had an attitude that work produced in the past, even in the not so distant past, was better, or more serious, or more original, than the stuff currently being produced by their peers. (See centuries of worship of Ancient Greek writing, for instance.) Now it does seem more accelerated, probably due to us having all of this exact evidence of what the prior era looked like and sounded like at our fingertips.

But revivals all say something about what people think the time they live in lacks. The 50s revival in the 70s was about yearning for a more placid time, before Vietnam and cultural change. The 60s revival in the 80s was about people feeling a lack of depth or meaning in the culture. 70s revival in the 90s was kind of a search for an unironic goofiness that had been lost to knowingness. And I guess the 80s revival is a search for flash and verve and shininess.

(Kind of funny that we keep talking about Phil Collins, but no mention of the massively huge Billy Joel album that was meant as a 50s tribute but totally reeks of the 80s now.)

i'm also guessing that in the 19th century (and earlier) a piece of music that was 20 or 30 years old could be considered pretty current!

In many ways i think this is the case today also (though in other contexts it isn't)

Where does Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go? figure in to this conversation?

ha idk why i didn't think of that before 'dear prudence'

i want candy probably in my top 5 of 80s 60s covers. there were lots of good ones. (still kinda prefer colourbox's motown over kim wilde's motown, but i got lotsa love for kim!)

i'm also guessing that in the 19th century (and earlier) a piece of music that was 20 or 30 years old could be considered pretty current! i mean, unless you had access to the sheet music or were lucky enough to hear a performance of something new, it might be years before you came into contact with some stuff.

Not sure.

The world exposed to commercially reproduced music was much smaller in the 19thc than now, but it moved fast enough: Late Beethoven-> Wagner = 30 years: worlds apart.

And if you look closely enough at folk musics under the impact of industrialisation and speedier communications -and movement of peoples - there are also huge transformations. Mass production of new instruments as well..... look at how the accordion became a 'folk' instrument in less time than it took the drum machine.

The 50s revival in the 70s was about yearning for a more placid time, before Vietnam and cultural change. The 60s revival in the 80s was about people feeling a lack of depth or meaning in the culture. 70s revival in the 90s was kind of a search for an unironic goofiness that had been lost to knowingness. And I guess the 80s revival is a search for flash and verve and shininess.

Doesn't this all basically boil down to cultural producers' nostalgia for their childhood/adolescence?

Sure. And brings with it a child's misreading of what that era was really like.

Actually, I think that the Sixties Revival was people being nostalgic for their older sibling's/parent's youth.

well the boomer nostalgia onslaught was in full swing by the 80's. joan baez at live aid: "this is your woodstock!" fuck you, joanie!

Yeah, 60s nostalgia was kind of forced on 80s kids by condescending boomers with their Rolling Stone magazines and their Wonder Years.

Which doesn't apply to the garage rock revivalists, the psych revivalists, and the like.

Yeah, 60s nostalgia was kind of forced on 80s kids by condescending boomers with their Rolling Stone magazines and their Wonder Years.

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when I clerked in a record store in the late 70s - several years before Jim "He's Sexy & Still Dead" Morrison graced the cover of Rolling Stone - teenagers were snapping up Doors albums. couldn't keep em in the store. FWIW

The fifties revival in the seventies did kind of suck, it was like some people's fifties. Sixties revival...well there were a number of them, some of them annoying distortions of the era and some just punk or new wave kids wanting more music.

i got a cd in the mail last week that was total big beat/fatboy slim/90's thing and i cringed a little that this might be a trend of some sort. not ready yet...

well, i was a happy days and laverne & shirley fan (or maybe i was just a gary marshall fan), and i don't know what my sister would have done without Grease in her life.

not ready yet...

Not ready ever.

(a) the past becomes "the past" culturally much faster now than ever before

weird cuz i was listening to Quadrophenia by the Who the other day and it struck me how weird it was, there's even little snippets of old Who songs in the segues, like they are basically mythologizing their own past in rock opera making mod sound like a long lost world

then i thought to look it up...Quadrophrenia came out in 1973. Their first single "I Can't Explain" came out in 1965...8 years!

that's the same amount of time that elapsed between Radiohead's Hail to the Thief and King of Limbs!

A lot of stuff happened between 1965 and 1973 though.

yes i guess i was refuting the point that i had before my post in italics

You're right, maybe the past becomes past a little less fast now--especially since a lot of the artists who were big in 2001 (Radiohead, Jay-Z, Timbaland, Strokes) are still talked about fairly regularly ten years later.

Compare that to, say, 1957 through 1967. Very few of the big artists stayed on top. Maybe just Elvis, and even he had to stage a comeback in 68.

or say, like compare 1970 to 1980

i hate to give it to the boomers on this one, but the period '55-'75 might just be different somehow.

that's fine! i mean, '35-'55 was pretty wild and unique too, but instead of music it was nazis.

i dunno. but even 1980 to 1990 seems more different than like 2000-2010...1990-2000 is a little more change but less so, like maybe things are slowing down?

and I'd say things felt as different from 75-85 as they did from 65-75

xp The first compilation in Original Sound's Oldies But Goodies series hit the album chart (got to #12) in 1959; track listing has Five Satins' "In the Still Of night" (1956), Teen Queens' "Eddie My Love" (1956), Sonny Knight's "Confidential" (1956), Cadets' "Stranded In The Jungle" (1956), Mello Kings' "Tonite Tonite" (1957)!, etc. So that's nostalgia more than twice as fast as Quadrophenia! The "oldies radio weekend" that Wolfman Jack hosted in American Graffiti was an only slightly longer time span (nostalgia for late '50s hits in 1962), and apparently there was a "doo-wop revival" around the same time (lots of it from Italian-American groups trying to do what black groups had hit with just a few years before.) By the sixth and last charting Oldies But Goodies LP, in 1965, it looks like there was already nostalgia for the early '60s (e.g,. Dion & the Belmonts' "Runaround Sue," from 1961.)

agree that changes from the 50s - 90s were fast + sweeping, and seem less so now

there's 12 years between the first black sabbath album and the first sonic youth album, and 30 years between the first sonic youth album and now

but I can still go to a warehouse in providence and watch ppl torture instruments for fun followed by stoner blues doom stuff

maybe revivalism is stratified now and the movement is vertical instead of horizontal

The White Album, Beggars Banquet, and John Wesley Harding (along with Elvis's TV special) were perceived at the time as spearheading a "back-to-basics" move that may or may not have been rooted in nostalgia. I mean, Dylan doesn't strike me as the most nostalgic person in the world, but there was a turn away from the Sgt. Pepper landscape to something closer to earlier rock and roll.

Stupid social trends question: There's a stereotype of less cultural interaction as people age out of their teens/early 20s or a weight on youth culture that still exists, but I feel like it was heavier in the 50s/60s. Is this a real phenomenon, or just something I've dreamed up?

It feels like a lot of the fast-moving music culture has kind of changed and that the audience doesn't necessarily drift on to the next thing now.

xp You also had the Band around then. And Creedence. And a pretty big "blues revival" in England. And a few years later, Led Zeppelin saying it's been a long time since I rock and rolled, it's been a long time since we did the stroll. (Nobody's mentioned the "folk revival" of the late '50s here yet either, I don't think -- wonder if Simon does.)