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

I'm reminded of something Billy Bragg said about the decline of protest songs - how when he was young pop was often how you found about things and certainly the major outlet, short of actual activism, for political frustration, whereas now the internet has made both getting information and voicing frustration so easy that people are less likely to look to music to do that job. Music's role as an information portal has declined. And it's not just politics but music as a way of conveying ideas about literature, cinema, ideas, fashion, tribal identity, etc. The kind of listener who never looked to music for that in the first place won't mourn that development but I do and SR does.

Spotify doesn't work in Australia yet so I have difficulty even understanding let alone appreciating its supposedly seismic effect on music listening. But most people I know still don't use the Internet as their primary means of finding out about music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkemUTvL8g

great store btw

that wasn't meant to go here

I think as I said, the actual role of music, as I said, as a connecting point to rest of world, is sort of gone. Again it's not really a negative thing, but I think it's fair to say in a general sea of info and opinions and v easily consumable info music might matter a bit less than it did.

This reminds me a bit of the articles you read about the decline of 'event TV' - when there were fewer channels and fewer things to do you'd be more likely to have these moments where big swathes of the country were watching the same thing at the same time, and outside major sporting events and Royal Weddings and the like you just don't get that any more. But for most people more choice is a good thing, it doesn't necessarily entail less TV is being watched in general or is of a lesser quality or resonates less - it's just harder to pinpoint 'universal' moments, or points when you can say "yes, this matters, this is important".

The same's true with pop music to an extent but it's never been THAT universal, it's always been about competing noises and scenes and characters and ideas of pop that in the past were easier to bundle together into universal or faux-universal moments (TOTP appearances, caring about what was number one, 'event' albums etc) and some of those fade in the memory quicker than others. And while I'm sure that "music as a connecting point to the rest of the world" and as an information portal or protest vehicle or conduit for ideas about art or literature, have always been a part of it, I'm not sure they've ever been typical of the way most people experience music. If anything TV was the main connecting point to the rest of the world for decades before the internet.

And yeah maybe they've declined (although I'd say the decline in protest songs precedes the internet) but maybe the wider sigificance of those aspects of music is also maybe being inflated in hindsight. But it's central function, as a focal point for social gatherings, isn't going anywhere any time soon, and that still matters to a hell of a lot of people.

I don't think this discussion makes any sense if you keep referring back to "most people", ie people who don't give much of a toss about music. There has to be a certain minimum level of curiosity of passion, otherwise of course pop music was never important. That's like talking about the cultural importance of football based on my memories of collecting Panini World Cup stickers every four years. It's meaningless.

Also, there's a limit to this "inflated in hindsight" angle. Yes, maybe it is sometimes exaggerated for narrative neatness, and of course the nation didn't gather round as one to watch Bowie hug Ronson on TOTP, but it genuinely did have wider significance - just look at primary sources, speak to people who followed music and politics in previous decades. Ask people who were energised by rock'n'roll or punk whether TV was more important than music. It's like you're doggedly trying to downplay the cultural significance of pop in the past in order to assert that not much has changed, but you don't have any evidence for that. "It's always been like this" is ahistorical.

Spotify is a more comprehensive rhapsody (idk if they had that in australia) and I think its more radical for people who never used that service.

Let's say you're a young black person in America in the 60s or Britain in the 70s. Where are your role models in public office? On TV? In the movies? They're mostly in music. Who's reflecting young people's impatience in 1963 or 1976? Rock bands. Now there are havens and outlets all over the place but that wasn't always the case. You can't say that pop music isn't less pivotal than it was unless your test case is always the kind of person who bought Englebert Humperdinck instead of Strawberry Fields Forever or Renee and Renata instead of Ghost Town.

I think we're at a point where artists can and should simply pick and choose from the past as if it were a giant grab bag of styles free of any kind of extramusical associations.

this is a very jagger-esque attitude

Wow! Been trying to keep up with this thread all day.

I'm in accordance with most of what DL and Garda have been saying an this relates to a dialogue i've been touting for a while. Pop and rock does not exist in a vacuum - it is both an influence on and a product of the wider changing world.
And sure there's a tendency to romanticise certain events and their impact - but this is the same with everything in history. In a strange way what's often more important when documenting music history isn't what actually happened (probably driving Ford Cortinas listening to Billy Ocean and Wet Wet Wet on the A1M) than what inspires people (the illusion of everyone flocking to Ibiza and taking berries with Danny Rampling). Of course the latter applied to only about 3 people in 1987, but which story is going to motivate people more? What is going to spurn other people into creating their own scene? Why shouldn't people be allowed to fantasise about this very individual experience that gets documented so often in dance music retrospectives? The sixties were only swinging for a tiny minority of Carnaby Street poseurs, the rest of the populace most likely oblivious to this charade. But how many have drawn influence from this ideal? Same goes for the eighties revival - people continue to dredge influence from the decade, finding more and more influences as they go. Is it so surprising this revival has been going on longer than the initial decade? I use to think so, but now I see no reason why.
The idea of stagnation interests me. Is it really us running out of new ideas? Or has the lily of rock and pop been gilded so perfectly that we can finally sit back, marvel and muse upon it?

so cliches interest you more than reality huh

Is it really us running out of new ideas?

no

Or has the lily of rock and pop been gilded so perfectly that we can finally sit back, marvel and muse upon it?

no

people continue to dredge influence from the decade

SOME people
many people don't

"stagnation" - well YOU may have stagnated but don't go putting that on everyone else please

Uh, lex, have you even been reaibg the book/this thread or...?

Reading (iPhone)

i've been reading this thread, i have no interest in reading the book and have bowed out whenever people have talked about it specifically

Xpost Look, I'm not saying people should actively make shit up an embellish the past, but people did go to Ibiza and take pills with Danny Rampling in 1987, and yes, I'd be lying if I were to say I'm less interested in hearing about that story than a Doctor and the Medics show at the Hatfield Forum.

You can't address the topics in this thread or in the book without talking about the hypothesis of stagnation. I never said, and indeed I don't believe, we are stagnating, but there is a school of thought running through this discourse that asks whether we're in danger of running out of ideas by constantly recycling the past. In fact, to save you the trouble of reading it, that's pretty much the premise of the book in the first place. And it concludes that, no, retromania isn't necessarily a bad thing. SR says himself that he'd be hypocritical for thinking so himself.

not "necessarily" a bad thing, but something that he thinks is likely to lead to a winding down of novelty in pop music right?

which he already sees as having begun over the past decade

Xpost (seems it's impossible for me not to make vast grammatical errors while bashing away at a phone, fuuuu-)

In fact, to save you the trouble of reading it, that's pretty much the premise of the book in the first place

this is why i have no interest in the book! just a stupid, stupid premise

I think this has more to do with your abhorrence of certain values than any premise, otherwise we wouldn't be discussing it and there wouldn't be a book to discuss.

Anyway, enough bickering - what about the topic of reverence? craftmanship? Learning from Past masters? Originality doesn't just drop fully fledged from the womb. The concept of originality, as mentioned in SR's bit about Japanese art and culture, is fairly recent in itself. Even in Britain, early 19th century painters were taught to paint by rote - breaking rules was unheard of. Is it wrong for a band like, say, Yuck to so admire the sound of Dinosaur Jr as to want to recreate it for themselves? What about dance artists like Lone who seems to be obsessed with mimicking early Warp records? Is that wrong? If I were an artist and someone berated me for ripping off e.g. Talking Heads, would I be pissed off, or would I take it as a complement, as having attained the sound of my latter day heroes?

Ah sheeet. Just realised I've left the bloody book lying around somewhere in Shoreditch Town Hall. I was three quarters through and all. Buggeration.

xp lex, I think you're far too dogmatic re: pop's future vs its past to accept any of SR's argument. You simply don't want it to be true, ergo you call it stupid. But it's not like SR spends his time making this shit up - there are issues to be addressed here even if you don't agree with him on what constitutes a problem.

Also, it's a cheap point to say dog latin prefers cliche to "reality". They're all competing narratives.

I think I figured out what bothers me about Reynolds' use of the term "retro."

To me, a movement like Northern Soul is what I would consider retro because of the way that it exclusively mined a single historical moment and spawned a whole nostalgic youth culture tribe. But over the past decade, revivalism has functioned much more like it did at Optimo, in terms of picking and choosing from a grab bag of the past, free from any contextual baggage and cohesive tribe-defining narrative.

Even a band like White Stripes is not quite retro in the same way as say the Jam -- again, the absence of an associated youth culture tribe. Now the artist is free to be nostalgically focus on a particular period, but it's not really required of the audience. And the framing, the imagery, the use of stuff like a Digitech Whammy pedal puts the Stripes' revivalism in a contemporary context that frees the audience from necessarily having to share the artist's obsessions.

I think musicians over the past decade have approached revivalism in a really similar way to what Roxy Music did, but Reynolds is treating it them like they're Sha Na Na.

It seems like a lot of bands today are reviving more obscure, forgotten niche styles - styles that may never have been very popular to begin with. This is less like the old retro bands and more like an act of historical detective work, which is made possible by the vast universe of past music now available to us. Finding something sufficiently obscure and trying to really understand what was unique about it and then bringing it back to life is creating something new, I think.

good point

xxxpost. Right, there are bands taking a "really similar" approach as Roxy Music in the same way that Sha-Na-Ma took a "really similar" approach as Little Anthony and the Imperials. Don't really see the difference.

My two cents is that Reynolds is a great writer about music and I love his stuff. However it seems that the protocols of the publishing industry demand that his little vignettes about the Human League or whoever have to be hung on a grand narrative, which is usually bogus and should be ignored.

And I think the relationship between revivalism and nostalgia is more complex now. An esoteric musical niche that was never popular can still trigger some kind of nostalgia in a person. Just like we can be nostalgic for periods that existed long before we were born. But artists now can kind of find these highly personal realms of nostalgia that are dependent on their unique life experience, and use those to create something new and personal that doesn't necessarily trigger the same nostalgia in the audience.

Whereas I think we've traditionally thought of retro art as being something that taps into a larger shared experience and therefore triggers a collective nostalgia. And that's almost always something that would have to appeal to an older audience who is nostalgic for a particular period of time in their youth. That's quite a different process than somebody in their 20s borrowing stuff that was made 30 years before they were born.

xpost

Right, there are bands taking a "really similar" approach as Roxy Music in the same way that Sha-Na-Ma took a "really similar" approach as Little Anthony and the Imperials. Don't really see the difference.

Well, by similar approach to Roxy Music, I mean creating a hybrid of past styles and contemporary styles without any concern for the purism and authenticity that some revival movements demand. I don't mean that they sound anything like Roxy Music.

I mean, on the one hand you have the 60s folk revival, blues traditionalists, northern soul, Daptone, and on the other hand you have Dylan going electric, Hendrix, Roxy Music, and Panda Bear.

Yeah well some people would point out that Sha-Na-Na only sound superficially like Little Anthony either. I've only ever heard one Panda Bear song and it reminded me strongly of 80s era twee-pop band St Christopher.

Listen folks, the best way to read a Reynolds book is to ignore the introduction and the opening and closing chapters which are supposed to contextualize the whole thing, and read the rest of the chapters in any order you like. He's good on the little details and the overall theme is generally garbage.

Interesting distinction between collective and private (or imagined) nostalgia, wk.

I don't think Reynolds in any of his writing denies that a lot of revivalists (or, let's call some of them quasi-revivalists) bring something new to the table - and he seems to be specifically enamored of people like Panda Bear or Ariel Pink who he sees as making music drawing on the past but which could never have been made in the past. It's more like: he considers that this will be harder and harder to do over time because the number of forgotten moments in history that can be mined and the ways in which

I would say the key difference between Person Pitch and J Lo's "On The Floor" is that while the former is deliberative-imagined (the music is set up to draw attention to the intermittent out-of-time-ness of its vocals) the latter is indifferent-collective (the song straight revives and interpolates "Lambada" which everyone above a certain age will remember, and "twists" the revival only in the sense of depositing it into a contemporary sounding pop song, but is equally happy if you recognise all of this or if you don't).

Which I guess is the same distinction SR is drawing: to him Panda Bear remains post-modernist in a good way (though not as good as full blown modernism was) whereas "On The Floor" would be post-post-modernist, indicative of a culture where quoting from the past is so accepted and routinised that it registers barely if at all.

In this way, SR is able to be inconsistent and judgmental about what kinds of revivalism are good and what kinds are bad (or, at least, more indicative of a depletion of cultural ideas and futurism).

I'm interested in whether he develops the above in the book because I don't know that in his articles he's thought through this disparity (assuming I'm correct in ascribing it to him) enough.

I feel like I disagree with it but I'm not quite sure what my position is yet.

I've only ever heard one Panda Bear song and it reminded me strongly of 80s era twee-pop band St Christopher.

I've never heard of them, but I'm listening now and liking it. thanks. the guitars kind of remind me of the Dovers who coincidentally were sampled on the song Walkabout by Atlas Sound & Panda Bear.

Listen folks, the best way to read a Reynolds book is to ignore the introduction and the opening and closing chapters which are supposed to contextualize the whole thing, and read the rest of the chapters in any order you like. He's good on the little details and the overall theme is generally garbage.

Big truth bomb - there's lots to be enjoyed about this book even if you don't agree with it's premise.

Nads. I really wish I hadn't lost the damn thing.

So should I get the uk version or is the u.s. Ok? I seem to remember ppl upthread saying something was missing from the u.s.?

to him Panda Bear remains post-modernist in a good way (though not as good as full blown modernism was) whereas "On The Floor" would be post-post-modernist, indicative of a culture where quoting from the past is so accepted and routinised that it registers barely if at all.

Part of the appeal of postmodernism is/was that stylistic signifiers are a major part of the content of a given piece of work. If the J. Lo song is just quoting a riff, it doesn't have that in the same way. Postmodernism involves a greater commitment to some kind of style.

I think that's what Tim F was saying. Without those signifiers we get into some kind of post-postmodern "everything old is new again" situation?

"Listen folks, the best way to read a Reynolds book is to ignore the introduction and the opening and closing chapters which are supposed to contextualize the whole thing, and read the rest of the chapters in any order you like. He's good on the little details and the overall theme is generally garbage."

yeah without repeating myself, the opening and closing chapters kinda ruin in fact what is basically like a slightly conflicted ('this shouldnt feel right.... but it does!') love letter to retro scenes. i loved the bits with billy childish and the guy from the crypt label and the cramps. the book in fact made me more in love with crazy retro obsessives. the first and last chapters basically ruin the premise of the book and have little to do with whats in between. he should have just written a book in full favour of retroism and given the first and last chapters to the wire or guardian or something.

whole book is kinda rockist btw. even in spite of the bits on hip hop and dance music. like hes just waiting for rock to get 'futuristic' again, forget the places which are futuristic (limited though they may be).

It's easy to see how someone valuing postmodernism would hear a record like Britney Spears' "Toxic" and hear the signifiers but not hear the commitment they would in, say, Stereolab. So, just drawing a distinction between those two things is not being inconsistent.

"Toxic" may not be so great an example actually.

I think what is inconsistent about the approach is that in a situation where you are saying modernism is better than post-modernism which is better than post-post-modernism, you are ignoring the fact that (what looks to you like) modernism is more likely to emerge from (what looks to you like) post-post-modernism than it is from (what looks to you like) post-modernism*.

i.e. it is precisely the lack of "commitment" in a past-sampling pop song to some vision of the past that can make it more fully "present". Despite the prominence of the sample, "On The Floor" has much more in common with other pop music of 2011 (which admittedly SR considers to be revivalist from top to bottom anyway) than it does with Kaoma.

A better, or easier to read example in retrospect is something like Missy Elliott's "The Rain(Supa Dupa Fly)" - yes, it samples "I Can't Stand The Rain", but the presence of that sample does not make it different in character or resonance to Missy's other hits of that era not based around a prominent sample.

So the problem I have I guess is that this three-tiered hierarchy should really be considered to be more like a loop - distinctions can be drawn, sure, but not across-the-board qualitative distinctions.

* To be more accurate I guess SR seems to go for what you might call meta-post-modernism - music which he considers doesn't so much bring elements of the past to the present (I don't think he's a massive post-95 Stereolab fan, for instance), but rather erm "problematises" the very relationship between past and present - e.g. hauntology, music which seems to want to capture the sepia-toning-and-fading effect of misremembering and nostalgia (Boards of Canada, Ariel Pink, Panda Bear). However, this strikes me as a category within post-modernism rather than apart from it.

The thing is, and I can speak for myself here and my own perceptions over time, I personally felt, quite genuinely, that serious postmodernism in pop music was a type of advance. So, in that sense, I was perhaps seeing it as a modernist-like development. It certainly didn't feel like any less of a modernist-type development than, say, punk or '80s New Pop.

Tim can you break down what ou mean by "advance" in that context? It's not that I disagree, more that I think understanding what we mean when we use such terms in different contexts really gets to the heart of this issue.

Yes, quite simply that when I first heard Stereolab in 1993, it was a moment when I felt that underground rock music had just made a major shift.

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