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

200+ houses destroyed by a tornado up the road from me in springfield the other day. i ain't complaining about nothing.

in fact if you ever hear me complain about anything just hit me.

but seriously my allergies are REALLY bad this season. oy, enough already.

if anyone needs anything new in their life, the new album by Rat Catching on the Fedora Corpse label is superb. a one woman show. roland juno-6, jen sx2000, korg monotron, casio vl-1. vinyl only though, i think. very cool.

Rat Catching on the Fedora Corpse label

laughted out loud

roland juno-6, jen sx2000, korg monotron, casio vl-1

did she buy her gear from you?

Vinyl only you say...

"Honestly, now that I'm in my 30s there's just not enough time to be retro. Once I dug through crates. Now I bookmark reviews of books about digging through crates and forget I've bookmarked it. Actually maybe I'm in my 60s."

otm

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/daftsod.jpg

why did he name this pop cultures addiction rather than musics addiction? seems like a misnomer considering music is his main focus.

Retromania is the sound of a pop critic’s midlife crisis.

I've started reading this - so far it's more interesting than I expected.

I think it's way more nuanced and varied than any extract or review would suggest. It's more an exploration than a manifesto and the autobiographical elements enrich the ambivalence. This bit in the Telegraph review made me lol:

I found myself reading it in a sushi restaurant, with Japanese food travelling around on a conveyor belt, while digital animations projected onto a wall and the British rapper Tinie Tempah’s number-one hit single Pass Out exploded from hidden speakers in a sonic fizz of bleeping hip hop, electro, drum and bass and dancehall.

Sushi on a conveyor belt? Slow down, spaceman.

Yeah, it's definitely more than a 450-page rant about pop-music-these-days. He gets that out his system in the intro and prologue and then uses that as a diving board to explore the history and documentation of pop culture as a whole in a fairly balanced way.

Saw this is in Waterstone's the other day, reduced already, or do they do that to a lot of new books these days?

I got my copy remarkably cheap from Amazon.

I'll wait till it turns up in FOPP for £3, prob'ly three or four months from now, sorry Simon.

don't think Waterstone's reduces new stuff per se, more knocks a wedge off the RRP because it can

and yeah I don't think I've paid more than a fiver for any of the SR books I own

don't think Waterstone's reduces new stuff per se, more knocks a wedge off the RRP because it can

I suspected that, to make you think you're getting a bargain

how much cheaper? its 9 quid on amazon.

those sushi on conveyor belt places generally have mediocre sushi

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011pph2#synopsis

Really good discussion of this on last night's edition of Night Waves (about 20 mins in). Simon is interviewed but they rope in the sceptics too.

Don't think he was too convincing, but no one was out there to get him or anything.

guys just reminding you amazon is the devil ok carry on

Excellent interview at Thequietus, as usual: http://thequietus.com/articles/06386-simon-reynolds-retromania-interview

Can I just say Thequietus is the one music site I always keep up with aside from ILM?

It's profoundly frustrating and, frankly, delusional of the publisher that in this day and age of instant gratification/digital downloads/etc. that the release of this book is delayed by 6 weeks in the U.S.

pdf/epub?

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-retro-rock-20110710,0,3613794.story

Ahistorical bullshit.

Once upon a time, pop's metabolism buzzed with dynamic energy, creating the surging-into-the-future feel of periods such as the psychedelic '60s, the post-punk '70s, the hip-hop '80s and the rave '90s. The 2000s felt different. The sensation of moving forward grew fainter as the decade unfurled.

Oh you mean the psychedelic '60s that were built on the foundation of a folk revival, an interest in indian classical music, music hall, avant garde electronic music from 15 years prior? The hip-hop that was built almost entirely on sampling 20 year old records? The '90s rave music that basically just revived underground club music from the '80s?

yeah, that stuff.

If anything killed pop-music's forward momentum it was the endless fracturing of music into meaningless sub-genres with a built-in expiration date. Which then leads to the tendency to drive one idea into the ground for a couple of years before some writer coins a new genre name and people change the sound up slightly and pretend it's something different.

i find that this essay does not get more interesting every time i read it

That's because you're re-reading it, hence you're guilty of retromania!

Anyone have further information on what the deal is between the UK and US versions of this book are? I am planning on purchasing it and want to know what the best version is and who I can direct my Twitter snark at regarding these differences.

There are no differences other than the cover.

Cool thank you very much for the info!!!

why is the UK cover so FUCKING HORRIFIC.!!?>!???

i like the cover! also i think it kinda links back to the yellow and pink of Rip It Up's cover but maybe that's not the intention.

just finished this. it was a great read, beautifully written, lots to think about, and achingly researched, and if it makes people think about the stasis of pop which i dont think most people would disagree with (though there have been exceptions as this board knows like juke, grime, dubstep etc) then thats great.

but despite the first and last chapters, this was more like an exploration of retro trends and fetishists. i expected it to be more of a larger manifesto about how we have gone wrong and how we can put it right, rather than an examination/exploration of retro culture/nostalgia industries etc over the years, fascinating as all that is/was.

the other thing i found a bit strange was that for all the talk of sci fi and how space programs inspired optimism for the future and sci-fi sonics in music and so on, i thought he missed a bit about not just wanting music to SOUND like the/a future, but for music to aspire for other things to be better, all the old big battles like equality, poverty, peace (dont lol) and so on. ideological optimism for the future (or disatisfaction with the present, but then most music around or at least thats popular isnt really about reflecting much to do with the now either). but i dont think there was much about anything like that. it was largely about the sci-fi dreaming slant. didnt seem much about the diminishing role music plays in a lot of peoples lives either, the way its been relegated to something less significant than it was, which is another factor in why it wont be going at full throttle speed as it once did, or not much mention of it in any case.

^^ this. all of this. I enjoyed the book, but you're raising some absolutely key points which do get hinted at but could've been explored in a little more detail.

I say enjoyed, although admittedly I haven't quite finished it yet. It's a good read and I like the way it certainly isn't all about yelling at clouds.

it was sort of like reading a great degree/masters dissertation

i found it odd he barely mentioned the smaller role music plays in the cultural landscape these days esp when im sure he knows it/cited sci fi writers view of our tech-drowned present, which should have set him off travelling down that path, one where music is everywhere but meaning less - youd think his kids approach to media and the web etc would have made this figure a bit more.

Maybe he didn't want the book to sound so much like his blog.

the diminishing role music plays in a lot of peoples lives either, the way its been relegated to something less significant than it was

this isn't actually true

actually the book sounds very much like his blog, its quite personal at times, with him talking about his babysitter, family and so on

lex isnt it?

actually yes the book does come across at times as him fighting the impulse to go full-curmudgeon and at times i think that is exactly what was needed if he was trying to really do a lester bangs-isn 'make ppl sit up and take notice' type of piece

i think music is as immensely significant to people as it ever was

the kind of people to whom it's not significant are not the kind of people to whom it'd ever have been significant

and "significant" is a gradient anyway

xxpost: lester bangs or allan bloom? some of this sounds like "the closing of the american ear"

lex otm