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

hoo boy rose tinted glasses

http://www.beatcontrol.co.uk/images/P/surgecymbal_16ride_lg-01.jpg

I wonder what his assessment is based on. It seems most people around me are only interested in recent material. It is hard to tell from the review what ground he is covering.

That catalog blurb ends with the most obvious easy to answer question in the world: "Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?"

Um. Answer: no. But I bet it's a good read.

i really hate that cover.

started a kinda dumb thread about all this 9 years ago as 2002-2005 was when i felt most concerned with the idea, but i became less worried about an objective sense of newness after that, thankfully. the sense of being able to look into the past and see...not everything but certainly more than enough, became more comfortable.

tom ewing's latest pitchfork sums things up really well.

latest pitchfork column, that is
http://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/7956-poptimist-38/

This helped me crystallize a thing I've been aware of for a while but never quite pinned down. Music has a past, yes. But my individual perception of that past falls into two sections: a "long past," the time before I really became aware of music as an ongoing, evolving thing, and a "short past," the time ever since. Roughly speaking the inflection point, for me, is the end of 1988, and so the short past stands at 23 years and counting.

great point.

My 'short past' is a lot longer than the 'long past' of post- Elvis pop, but still, to doctor Tom's analogy - T. Rex are part of my present (which began in '72) whereas the Beatles are History (despite the latter being much more 'present' now than the former)

Yeah, that short/long past distinction really grabbed me well.

My own personal experience of things past or present nowadays is less this kind of distinction, more quick engagement -- it is often the case I'm usually hearing things only once these days, because there's so much else to hear and that I want to hear, regardless of whether it is something just released or something from decades ago. I still have my phases and all but they're generally limited. On the one hand this can be seen as the 'wrong' way to listen but on the other hand, it's a pretty honest reaction from where I sit. Yesterday I snagged twenty cheap CDs from Amoeba (and even then I had store credit so I didn't pay a cent); that'll mean a lot of new listening on top of everything else. Is it bad? Or is it a way to ensure that you are listening to a lot of different things instead of the same overall set?

i think people have been addicted to the past since, um, forever. its only natural. why do podst-modern writers read jane austen? simon's thing at the emp conference was concerned with this and i was totally gonna steal his etsy owl fetish line if i could somewhere. and i've been thinking about the hippie to punk connection for awhile now. and reading that book on crass this week just makes me think about it more.

"post"

This is my two pennies worth from the blurb; it's pointless comparing the nostalgia for the "past" (the last few decades) with renaissance nostalgia for Greek antiquity, as in the long-term scheme of things, culture from the past few decades could be considered the early part of "now". I doubt that yo bros in the renaissance were easily dismissing quality culture that appeared from thirty years ago (and if they were, that's fair enough - did you ever listen to da Vinci's New Romantic gear?).

This is my two pennies worth from the blurb; it's pointless comparing the nostalgia for the "past" (the last few decades) with renaissance nostalgia for Greek antiquity, as in the long-term scheme of things, culture from the past few decades could be considered the early part of "now". I doubt that yo bros in the renaissance were early dismissing quality culture that appeared from thirty years ago (and if they were, that's fair enough - did you ever listen to da Vinci's New Romantic gear?).

simon's thing at the emp conference was concerned with this and i was totally gonna steal his etsy owl fetish line if i could somewhere.

A very well-observed moment, that. Tracer started a thread on here about that whole style/approach and how he hates it.

speaking of nostalgia, simon introduced me to the dude who wrote those awesome books on disco/arthur russell. love that dude! those are my kind of history books. that's really the time i'm most interested in. now anyway.

I don't think your way is "wrong," Ned (and haha very funny at your asking that, as if you even consider it a real question), but it seems like awfully quantitative way of listening. One thing that has impressed me in the last few years is that I get at least as much enjoyment out of listening to the same things many times as I do trying to keep up with (areas of) the new, or trying to semi-systematically dig through the past. But that's me. And there will be phases, so sometimes I might go through lots of material really quickly; but I have to say I've been finding that unsatisfying lately.

(But as far as the theme of the Reynolds book, I just can't get all hand-wringy about it.)

Wow that is a shit cover.

think that's the UK cover and this is the US one:

http://i.imgur.com/jKk0T.jpg

it seems like awfully quantitative way of listening

I think I would see it that way if I actually set myself to listen to x amount of songs or albums a day -- which I don't. (Some days I might listen to a slew of albums, other days not even a song or two.) I think for me it's more of a 'well what else is out there?' impulse that kicks in as it does.

US cover is much worse than the UK one.

Maybe, but at least the US cover looks like someone spent more than 5 seconds on it (not much more than 5 seconds, mind).

I love Simon Reynolds but this is kind of a silly question, technology encourages people to re-connect with their past. We have a habit of thinking of pop culture as disposable or even embarrassing, but something that is "tacky" becomes an antique twenty or thirty years later!

Going back to the '80s, the mod and garage revival happening then (and this is 25-30 years ago already) always felt very contemporary to me and I can think of a few reasons why. Naturally, there were lots of stylistic derivations where influences that were not a part of the original style were incorporated, sometimes to great effect. But then I think of a band like the Tell-Tale Hearts, who were probably one of the most stylistically strict groups, and I still see them as being an '80s group. That's because, for one thing, no one would have thought to be so strict about style in that way in the '60s, but also because being strict like they were was a bit of a punk thing, which was very of its time.

Humans evolve and generations are always very different!

I wonder what the point is going to be, ultimately - that there will be a point where people will stop being influenced by everything that has happened before them and leave everything that we know as music behind? No more of the song structures that have been used until now, no more currently known instruments, no more predetermined key? But then the second artist who does something like that will have been influenced by the first, so er... ?

Going back to the '80s, the mod and garage revival happening then (and this is 25-30 years ago already) always felt very contemporary to me and I can think of a few reasons why. Naturally, there were lots of stylistic derivations where influences that were not a part of the original style were incorporated, sometimes to great effect.

My favorite memories are riding in my grandpa's car listening to easy listening radio. He had the power windows and velour seats before everyone else, his stereo sounded great.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y93/LordBlak/Slingshot.jpg

Whoops, wrong thread.

I bet Michael Henderson *is* addicted to his own past.

Just finished reading it. It's a fucking fine read. Probably the best book he's written in some respects. ILX gets bogged up in it.

really? does he make fun of my thud-rock thread?

Bigged up. Sorry. Goddamn iPhone spell check.

He complains that Deej doesn't post enough hip hop youtubes set in wheel trim shops.

whenever i go on my facebook simon is posting pub rock videos. ah youth.

i will read this. this is my kinda thing. i actually have opinions about this sorta thing.

I don't think I will read this - he's had interesting things to say in the past but I can't really connect with how he sees things. This whole idea of retromania or permanent retro I don't really get at all. I think maybe it makes sense if you have that thing of the endless turnover of subgenres which he likes, but I can't connect with that idea. Like for something to be retro requires leaving and returning, I just see things as all part of a whole. But then i have problems with the idea of 'progress' or 'future' in electronic (or any) music anyway

I think this idea of music turning back in on itself or whatever only really makes sense if you priviledge notions of progress (whatever that means) in the first place

"Evolution" would be more of a neutral term than "progress."

I'm interested in the book and will probably read it, but from my POV I'm confused by its premise. I'm with Eliot, who wrote "Time present and time past/are both perhaps present in time future." Lately I've been obsessed with the Association, Dwight Yoakam, and the new tune-YARDS. I don't think of Old Music vs New Music; part of being a listener is to open oneself to a continual seduction by historical forces.

Music has to be from the past, though, to be part of our cultural lore. It doesn't enter into that realm until we recognize that it's gone.

i blame sha na na. come to think of it, growing up in the 70's, i couldn't really get away from the 50's. the 50's were everywhere. and to be fair, there has been an 80's revival going on since 1990. even people in the 60's eventually got over their fetish for the 20's. but do you know what i REALLY hate? movies from the 30's and 40's set in the gay 90's.

it would be kinda of nice though if things DID go away for awhile. nothing goes away anymore.

TS Eliot OTM

and the first thing I thought of reading this was the 50s nostalgia craze in the mid 70s - people thought that was the death knell of pop culture too

who said "the past is forever present"? someone said that i think.

things used to be more disposable. in a sense. years ago. people got rid of their kid stuff. not anymore. every lame goddamn thing you ever half remember is right there for you to look at whenever you feel like it. that has to change something in the air.

and i just figure almost every moment of recorded history - tape, vinyl, wax cylinder, film, etc - is up for grabs now and forever. people didn't have that kind of access in the boring old days. all i had were robert klein albums where he would go on and on about playing stickball as a kid. now i can actually buy vintage stickballs and histories of stickball and it goes on and on and i can devote my life to writing songs about arcane street games of the 19th and 20th century if i wanted to. the past is alluring. especially if you look out the window. you ever see what's out there? i mean, can you blame people?

and as far as the blurb for the book goes, no, there is no end to the past. there really isn't. you could never use it all up. ask writers. they'll tell you. writing is all about reading the past. why wouldn't music be?

there has been an 80's revival going on since 1990

I first became aware of it with this album, which came out in '96, by which time the early '80s signifiers were distinctly retro, were distinctly of the past.

I've always thought of eighties revivalism as ramping up around 1997 - early nu-electro (e.g. IF), indie synth pop revivalism (e.g. The Pulsars), "Your Woman" at the top of the charts.

The only early 90s eighties revivalism I can think of is The Magnetic Fields. What else?

US cover is much worse than the UK one.

I was about to disagree, but then I saw the apostrophes in the years.

The alt-rock radio station I listened to in the early '90s had (ca. 1993-94) an '80s hour every day at noon, in which they played mostly college-rock/new-wave stuff like the Violent Femmes or the B-52s or Wall of Voodoo.

I'm not critiquing the idea that this is particularly retro-besotted era (those come and go), just Reynolds' location of 1965 as musical pop retro's ground zero.

On that note, from the liner notes to Nashville - The Early String Bands Vol. 2 (Country Records, 1976):

Radio came to Nashville in fall of 1925. It didn't take Nashville radio stations long to find out that old-time music had considerable audience appeal. Two years before, Atlanta had begun broadcasting artists like Fiddlin' John Carson, Clayton McMichen and Riley Puckett, and 1924 saw the establishment of the National Barn Dance on Chicago radio. Recordings by fiddlers and old-time singers, which major companies had started making in 1923, were selling handsomely in the South. Henry Ford was sponsoring old-time fiddle contests at every Ford dealership in the South and Mid-West, and arguing in his magazine that America's morals could be revitalized by reviving the old tunes and the old dances to replace "jazz songs".

- Charles Wolfe, Dec. 1975

Matt DC are you saying nevermind had no cultural impact in the UK or the US? cuz if you mean the UK i guess i'll have to believe you if you say so

but if you're saying the US, you are straight up crazy.

― amada thuggindiss (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, July 27, 2011 4:27 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Weird comment either side of the Atlantic I think. Thought Nevermind pretty instantly became the lp that everybody was playing. That was right in the middle of my band following hitching era. Used to be that if somebody put you up on tour you'd often discover records that you hadn't heard before being played to you then suddenly seemingly everybody was playing that.
& from the proliferation of Nirvana tshirts that were around for the next couple of years it did seem very widespread. Seemed to be a band whose tshirt that was on a lot of 17 year olds from that point on

Yea ok I guess that Victorian schtick was kind of a thing in haight-ashbury also?
Very true, but it seemed like a local phenomenon though... Almost as if the old SF Victorian architecture made everyone want to dress up like the gold miners and cowboys who were there a hundred years earlier.

― Reality Check Cashing Services (Elvis Telecom), Friday, April 13, 2012 9:13 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Possibly more directly a fashion begun by the members of the Charlatans?
The band that started the local rock scene and also had members who owned antique outlets.
From what I've seen of the styles of the time Victoriana was just one of several, Cowboys, Indians, Valentino-esque arabs and various other film stereotypes being among the more dressy-uppy. I think more prevalent was a style they referred to as 'mod' which was a warped take on Carnaby street and tends to be what you see bands like Jefferson Airplane & the Grateful Dead wearing. doesn't seem to come directly from actual mod but took its name from there.

& thinking of mod it has always struck me as deeply strange that a style (or set of them) that was constantly changing and trying to keep itself as cutting edge as possible should become something stereotypically retro

strange that a style (or set of them) that was constantly changing and trying to keep itself as cutting edge as possible should become something stereotypically retro

yeah, but the most self-consciously "up to date" things always date the fastest and usually become what we remember as retro

this book is dumb imo

"I posed the question on I Love Music, the hyper-intelligent discussion board"

vs

hey how about instead you eat my ass you clueless cum bubble

― simon trife (simon_tr), Thursday, September 26, 2002 12:31 AM (10 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The library has this book, but I've never gotten around to reading it.

feeling nostalgic for the time when i read this book.

yeah, this book is really dumb. As usual he is good at writing condensed histories of bands, scenes or whatever but his theorizing wavers between being utter bullshit or else so totally OTM that it amounts to stating the bleeding obvious.

well tbf after twenty pages i decided to sleep instead but

i. the preface's eliza-carthy-vs-joanna-newsom opposition is problematic -- claiming that carthy feels free to make the kind of record she does because she relates to folk as a living tradition whilst 'freak folk' only works on the basis of record collecting is ... problematic? i mean, yes, i like newsom and don't care for carthy but i don't think reynolds genuinely gives a shit about either, and if he did he'd have realised this makes a bad example.

'it's in her blood' is an icky argument for carthy -- like, any agency she might possess is just thrown out already. meanwhile to claim that yr average freak folk band consists of listening to records from the 70s and tries to Do That is ... silly, i know devendra banhart sings like a young marc bolan but the musical DNA of the thing as the whole is far more to do with the living tradition of jam bands obv --

but then this is also to ignore the fact that 70s folk is itself already in a deeply complicated relationship with the past, is basically forced to invent its own past as it modernises

but then you don't even need to go there, just ... does simon reynolds go to a sunburned hand of the man gig or listen to 'have one on me' and think "yes nothing original is taking place here" because at this point i just totally cease to trust his ears

ii. and then having failed to define his case he sets out to investigate it by narrating in the first person some recent experiences of his own in museums and suchlike -- i know the anecdotal recourse to stuff that's already been on the blog or in the paper is nice for composing a book but i think recalling one's own recent experiences is a bad motor for a book proposing to investigate the notion that recall of one's own &/or the culture's recent experiences has become a (cough cough) cultural dominant

iii. there's, like, two index references to jameson, try harder

I thought it was entertaining.
Was like reading a 500 page-long old Momus blog post or something (if you're into that kinda thing).

I'm a hundred pages into it. The beginning is kinda rough, as most of his points are pretty obvious, especially if you've read his blogs or interviews. I'm hoping it will get better and more about specifik artists.

I think general consensus is it's a good read so long as you take the initial premise with a pinch of salt. Luckily most of this is in the beginning and final chapters, so it's easy to do.

p. 26-31: reynolds points out that the 'i love the __s' documentaries are banal, with wholly cosmetic reference to derrida

p32-3: barry hogan cited as an authority on the economics of rock music

p33-34: "Musician/critic Momus railed against the 'museumification' of pop, comparing it to the way that classical music has a repertory of 'venerated masterpieces' that are endlessly reinterpreted."

...

"Mitchell and Forsyth and Pollard were forthcoming and engaged about all these 'how' aspects of their re-enactment projects. But somehow the 'why' kept eluding us in our conversations. The same thing happened when I checked out art criticism on this subject, which left me with little more than a vague impression that the work was timely and resonant."

"But what's really significant isn't so much the 'total recall' as the instant access that the Web's cultural databases make possible. In the pre-Internet era, there was already way more information and culture than any individual could digest. But most of this culture data and culture matter was stashed out of our everyday reach, in libraries, museums and galleries. Nowadays search engines have obliterated the delays involved in searching through a library's murky, maze-like stacks."

best way to read this is as reynolds trying to externalise his own midlife crisis + read its features on the culture at large, i think -- when you personally stop practising exegesis and just process cultural developments as a series of trends it's easy to imagine that the trends that are going on are uniquely empty of semantic content -- what's funny is how when he actually bestirs himself to *think* about the modes of past-obsessed music (like in the section on nico muhly and ohneotrix point never) it sounds like it is doing something interesting, vital, original

suspicions:

i. the global archive existed in our heads before it was a reality, which is why none of the stuff he isolates is exactly *new*
ii. it took a decade or two longer for the situation to become as obvious in pop music (by which i mean 'everything except improv and classical') because it's impossible to make 'historical pop music' in the same way as it is possible to make a 'historical film' or write a 'historical novel' -- so pop music appeared to continue to do 'new things'
iii. addiction to the novum, as an aesthetic mode, is as much a symptom of culture under capitalism as dependence on pastiche

Tell me that quote from Momus was laughed at by Reynolds.

no!!

his cultural myopia is astounding : ipod, therefore i am a "pilgrim's progress for the twenty-first century music fanatic"

this two pages after he's ragging on paul morley for sounding too much like a wired writer who refers to steve jobs 'building his brand like michelangelo painted the sistine chapel' ( = from a scaffold, presumably)

whatever.

i'm enjoying this so far. only 'wha?' moment for me was when he lumped 'naturals' in as a retro porn fad.

sometimes tits are just tits, man.

thanks for yr contribution to the thread

feel like this belongs in here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/03/pop-culture-past-growing-faster-present
not entirely sure what his point is, though! the 12-year-olds-think-rodriguez-is-bob-dylan comment is pretty lol-some though.

this belongs here too, i suppose: http://www.seattleweekly.com/2013-02-06/music/why-we-can-t-leave-the-90s/
i dunno, this all ends up depressing me, like i should feel guilty for enjoying reissues of old stuff. why? should i feel guilty about reading henry james? [not to say that's the authors of these pieces' intention, but whenever i read this stuff, that's how i end up feeling. think about my feelings.]

Yesterday I read an interesting anecdote about Paul Weller. Apparently an early review accused him of being a "revivalist" because of the clear debt owed to Pete Townshend. He cut it out, stuck it on a piece of cardboard and below it wrote "How can I be a fucking revivalist when I'm only 18?".

This struck me in particular because he was "reviving" a style that was less than 10 years old! I was a child of the 70s and a teenager of the 80s, and in retrospect culture was certainly moving very fast but can you imagine being accused of revising something from 2004 today?

no, in part because we're pretty conscious of what every 2004 artist was reviving themselves

the 12-year-olds-think-rodriguez-is-bob-dylan comment is pretty lol-some though.

not really related but it made me think of when Dylan went to china a couple years back and the young folks in the audience were singing along way more to his newer stuff than the old classics. Thought that was pretty cool.

i'm guilty of overrating some things because they have a compelling back story or w/e, but ... who cares? back story is part of the fun. i think at this point, that rodriguez album is probably overrated. it's good but not THE MOST AMAZING RECORD YOU NEVER HEARD or anything. but that doesn't mean it's not a fun thing to listen to/think about/etc.

so what do people think now? i really feel that in the years since this book came out i've been less bombarded with revivalism and 'retro' stuff in general. sure there are reissues and reunion shows and things, but they seem easily take-or-leave. it's quite nice really, compared to the last decade's infatuation with everything eighties.

just listening to old mixes i made myself in 2009, there was a strong stylised retrospective feel in even the most future-facing music which seemed to permeate the majority of the tracks - everything's very blocky and synthetic. and even though we've seen the popularity of things like 'uptown funk' and 'get lucky', which are obviously influenced by certain things from the past, they feel very much a product of today by comparison.

i dunno, i just don't feel as overloaded by retro-faddiness as even a few years ago. maybe it's an illusion, maybe not...

thoughts?

yeah things like 'play the whole album live, in order' feels like they've peaked. or maybe we just got used to it all?

yes

and i think it's a totally natural and reactionary response to the music environment of the past six years. i've definitely heard things out of the punk and electronic circles lately that have me go "hmmm, that sounds new" or "oh they're actually kinda striving for something. i CAN'T just reduce that to an album from 1972"

it was gonna meet a dead-end eventually as technology and tastes evolved and we're in the midst of that right now

Not music-related (unless you can't yuck, etc) but I've been thinking about it recently as we're in the midst of a 90s culture revival.

in terms of attitude and style, i think this generation takes a lot from the 90's just as they did from the 70's. and punk has definitely factored back into indie rock in a big way.... which it wasn't for awhile.

there's different things kinda happening at the same time thanks to the vastness of the internet. so there's no set theme as a of yet. but in comparison to the 2000's i think things are a bit "edgier"

the whole deal about getting shafted by the real world is very much at play which could be a little brother accomplice to the nineties kids who experienced the same thing

It's remarkable to see the long-term effects of how the internet reinforces and destroys geographical and temporal identities. The concepts that culture used to be able to rely on: authenticity, the underground, capitalism have been made irrelevant by an attention-based economy. At risk of sounding like an "I was there maaaann!" gen-x'er, I think that 90s ideas of trying harder at not giving a shit may just be the way to survive whatever hell you have to go through to be a creative in 2015.

almost ten years since this came out, which makes it kind of retro in its own right.

have things changed much in current pop culture discourse? I definitely think there's less of a 'war on nostalgia' these days; much fewer trappings of rockism vs poptimism.

Attempts to revive the 90s and 2000s feel more surface-level rather than a wholesale mining and apeing of tropes.

And hearing a young person listening to Smooth radio the other day elicited more of an 'aw that's sweet and strangely quaint' reaction from me rather than 'cuh, another person stuck in the past'

It was outdated almost from the moment it was published, shiny modernism was not exactly in short supply throughout the 10s and many of its biggest artists couldn't have emerged in any other decade.

i agree. i enjoyed the book and thought it had a lot of interesting things to say (as well as exploring some interesting facets of pop history i wasn't previously experienced in), but as soon as i finished it i had a sense of 'but of course that was then, this is now'

I'm completely unsure how younger generations treat nostalgia but I'm pretty sure it's unlike how people older than me did (with repackaging and midddle-browing of rock acts from the 1970s), or the 'OH MI GOD THAT'S SO SHIT I LOVE IT' sardonicness of students when I was at uni.

Things that I've seen revived by Gen-Zers tends to be more surreal and meme-based than tongue-in-cheek or overtly reverent: Trippy videos where the Simpsons melt into the walls; ill-advised Limp Bizkit tattoos; Pokemon cards selling for millions of dollars etc...

There's an extraordinary post from 2011 on this thread where someone claims that when Nevermind came out, it had "no dramatic or cross-cultural impact at the time". Let me just stop you there . . .

i never read this but always felt that it was dishonest; all creativity is based on past creativity; it always seemed like a difference in degree arg masquerading as a difference in kind arg to me

I think there was also a good deal of time in the 2010s spent finding new and creative ways to revive the 80s again. Like people getting really into City Pop. Though one could argue that City Pop in a way is kind of a 90s nostalgia type of thing since its influence can be felt in lot of ephemera for North American audiences being exposed to it through video games and anime, and then tracing that backwards.

I was hoping for there to be a big New Jack Swing revival in the 2010s, but all we got was that Bruno Mars song.

It seemed natural to anticipate a 90s revival in the 10s, but that it never really coalesced around a reviving a specific sound seems to confirm that internet/streaming/sharing really has dissipated that kind of collective reassessment.

I also people put too much stock in the idea of "the 20 year rule". I find revivalism tends to hue closer to being with split with halves of previous decades. Like I associate the 80s with late 50s/early 60s, the 90s with late 60/early 70s, and the 00s with late 70s/early 80s. And that still doesn't factor in revivals of revivals or weird anomalies like the Swing Revival of the 90s. So the 2010s would have had more of a late 80s/early 90s vibe going for it, which I think happened in some cases, but not as much I thought there would be. But then again, maybe post-Grunge left enough of a lingering sour taste for a lot of people, that it would still be a while till we got a Grunge revival. Also I find in many cases, it's never the obvious things that get revived either. It's often weird background ephemera, like people digging deep into old soundtracks or library music, or using vintage instruments, or rediscovering artists that might have been ahead of there time.

i never read this but always felt that it was dishonest; all creativity is based on past creativity; it always seemed like a difference in degree arg masquerading as a difference in kind arg to me

― Vapor waif (uptown churl), Thursday, October 29, 2020 2:49 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

funny, a lot of people upthread who hadn't read the book came to a similar conclusion