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

no

2011 seems like a bit of a creative unblocking on the whole for music

like...no just no no NO

you may not have been paying attention to the uh "non-retro" music being made in 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006 et cet et cet but it was assuredly there

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/oct/20/jarvis-cocker-music-fandom

Also Tom E weighing in on the 'does technology mean music means less than it used to?' discussion from upthread.

lex, i know for one you haven't read the book and therefore are not familiar with the arguments in it. for the record, i don't agree with his argument in its entirety, but i'd be interested to hear what you think is music from the last decade that is neither:

a: a revival of something from the past
b: a continuity of a style from a previous decade

Reynolds argument is that in the '60s you had rock, psychedelia, garage the beginnings of Jamaican pop; the '70s brought disco, punk, funk, reggae, glam etc; the '80s added hiphop, new-wave, synth pop; and in the '90s (or thereabouts) other movements like rave, jungle, etc were also introduced. He argues that the 2000s were largely concerned with recycling of old forms and did not really contain any mass youth or music culture revolutions in the same way as punk or rave or psychedelia. He says that even in dance music, many of the variations on house and techno were incremental and often harked back to styles originally invented in the 80s and 90s. Dubstep (prior to the time of his writing the book) had yet to emerge as a household force (he does mention Magnetic Man as a token dubstep crossover, but sweeps it under the carpet as being weaksauce).

This argument does sound like a shout at the clouds, but there's still a resonance that is hard to disprove, especially considering the old question: "Show me music that is of 1994 and something that's of 2006 and tell me the essential differences" - because other than software getting more streamlined, there've been few innovations (like the invention of the electric guitar, or the synth or music software etc) since then.

I would argue that there's nothing like a socio-political sea-change to get the creative hivemind flowing. I think that with the recent climate of global protest and economic collapse, we're seeing more people with more time on their hands to channel frustration and thoughts into their music. But that's just a theory.

the sound of robots fighting

seems that as soon as it got sent off to print suddenly the music industry go

this is your official bugbear now isn't it

i love the Drive soundtrack, I just think its existence and effects have been hilarious

every piece of music since 1836 has been a revival of Faraday's cage

Finished this last week.

The problem with the closing argument is that Reynolds begins to start seeing retro and derivativeness in almost everything. It's almost as though he wants a clear bolt-from-the-blue paradigm change in pop music, when that's clearly not how it works. He even points out that movements as ostensibly revolutionary as punk rock were actually routed in fifties and sixties revivalism.

He points to post-punk and rave as future-facing movements, but even these had foundations and influences from long before.

The only way a brand new music can ever exist is through a new interface; like how the advent of synthesisers helped to create electronic dance music. But it's also dangerous to romanticise the notion that one minute we were all sitting around listening to the Smiths, then someone invented the TB303 while pilling his face off and changed everything. Rave music wasn't a bolt from the blue - it was a culmination of events dating from as far back as the birth of rock music. Similarly, the post-punkers were largely art-school kids re-appropriating funk and disco licks several years after the fact.

The look, the attitude, the delivery had changed, but isn't this a bit similar to all the revivalism of the last decade that gets knocked in this book?

This is why think a lot of this is about Britishness or british attitudes more than any particular changes in music. The British music experience traditionally filtered through not only a more centralized media in general but a more prominent music press..heightening perception of difference over continuity, rollover of new genres and micogenres..exaggerating notions of progress (whatever that is)

Decline the role of music press and the engine behind this becomes reduced

dog latin otm

I can't say I didn't enjoy the ride though - it's rare I read a non-fiction book cover-to-cover, and this one I did. As mentioned upthread, it's the little insights, anecdotes and the actual philosophical journey, rather than the polemic that makes this book worthwhile.

Started reading this last week. Enjoyable, but a bit 'bloggy' so far.

In part since it addresses and responds (positively!) to the book, Mark Richardson's latest Resonant Frequency:

http://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/8713-this-is-me-music-making-as-re-blog/

relevant to our interests http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/07/the-artist-retrovision-grindhouse

more relevant: http://www.bookforum.com/index.php?pn=pubdates&id=8826

stop stanning.

like the roundtable thing. thanks. smarties being smart.

I'm about 100 pages into this so far and it strikes me as an incredibly cranky book. It's almost as if every last change to occur in the past 10 years just sucks from Reynold's point of view. It's weird because I typically think of him as a fairly cheerful writer, but here he just sees negativity in everything.

I also think the whole argument suffers from the idea that things are a particular way now and we are just stuck there with no end in sight. This is odd since all the changes he catalogs came about only very recently and surely will change just as quickly.

Should I expect more of the same for the next 300 pages?

I just finished reading it a couple days ago and am still processing it. He gets less prickly as you get into it as the book becomes more of a warning rather than a straight-up rant.

It was interesting reading it while the new season of Mad Men was starting up. Reynolds pegs 1965 as the year the nostalgia virus breaks out and it's right around the time where the SCDP crew seems like it's losing touch of pop culture.

What's SCDP?

Popular wisdom has modern cultural nostalgia as starting w american graffiti in 71...what are his reasons for 65?

dunno if there's anything about anomie of new suburbia tied in here tho that might be a touch earlier tho

Reynolds is a writer to fit facts to his theories tho, not partic trustworthy as a writer unfortunately

popular wisdom needs to be told that american graffiti didn't come out until 1973, well after the first 'rock'n'roll' revival (eg sha na na at woodstock)

Fair enough! I knew the film didn't come out till early 70s but haven't actually seen it

Hate the phrase 'popular wisdom' but wasn't quite sure what else to put

What's SCDP?

Sterling Cooper Draper Price - the ad agency in Mad Men.

Popular wisdom has modern cultural nostalgia as starting w american graffiti in 71...what are his reasons for 65?

It's when the demand for "newness" in British style culture outstretched the supply - the only way you could produce more culture was to start looking backwards. By early 1966, the Granny Takes A Trip shop opened up on London and became huge selling 19th century ephemera to rock stars.

The American timeline is different though, you already had Zappa's doo-wop album and Sha Na Na (Reynolds talks about them a bit, but their story seems wacky enough to merit their own book), but yah - 1973 and American Graffiti.

Yea ok I guess that Victorian schtick was kind of a thing in haight-ashbury also?

By setting their film O Brother, Where Art Thou before the era of the American folk revival (late 40s - late 70s), the Cohen Bros point out that the perceived "old timeyness" of music has been a selling point for a lot longer than we often remember. A lot of the country, folk and blues music that to us now seems simply "of its time" was actually nostalgic or revivalist when it was first recorded. It's hard to identify a single point at which popular culture began looking backwards in a sense that it never had before, but if there is such a point, it's certainly decades before 1965 or 1973.

Reynolds is a writer to fit facts to his theories tho, not partic trustworthy as a writer unfortunately

This should be at the top of the first post on all Reynolds threads forever really.

I also just finally read it myself -- was my reading on the way back from EMP! -- and I had my own problems with it, namely that it was (yeah, granted by default) white Anglo-American in focus. BARELY any discussion of if/how similar impulses play out among black artists or culture here or anywhere else, beyond a couple of quick interview bits and an quoted assertion about how there's no hip hop equivalent to classic rock radio. I count Simon as a friendly acquaintance (and he and his wife throw great parties) but I came away going "Uh?" at that.

If you think of time in hour slots then at 4pm 10am is going to sound retro

If you think of time in day slots then you're going to see the similarities between 10am and 4pm not the differences

I sometimes wonder what people listening in 200-300 years or so will make of late 20th century music. Like, will they be able to tell what came first, Hendrix or drum and bass, or will they listen and not really hear differences, think it was all happening at the same time?

Did you mention this before? To me, as only a passing fan of classical music, I haven't really developed an ear for the various developments through the ages - it's all "classical" essentially until we get to stuff like Gorecki.

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.

and I had my own problems with it, namely that it was (yeah, granted by default) white Anglo-American in focus. BARELY any discussion of if/how similar impulses play out among black artists or culture here or anywhere else, beyond a couple of quick interview bits and an quoted assertion about how there's no hip hop equivalent to classic rock radio

I thought the chapter on Japan was pretty incisive (but to be fair, it was how Japan assimiliates white American culture )

I need to post the audio of the talk Reynolds did with Bruce Sterling a couple months ago...

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.

But again, there'd been an olde-timey folk revival going on in NYC at least since the late 40s. Pete Seeger's Weavers had a massive hit with their version of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" in 1950. The Kingston Trio were an even bigger smash towards the end of the 50s and into the early 60s with similar material. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan came up in the early 60s, both originally performing mostly traditional songs. This wasn't simply the continuation of an ongoing "living" tradition, but was instead a secondhand recreation of the vanished past. The musicians and fans of this revival were reaching back into popular culture's history for "better" and "more authentic" ideas and expressions than those they found in the culture of their moment. Dylan on why his interests shifted from rock to folk (courtesy of wikipedia):

"The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings."

There were still enough traditionalists around to get might pissed off when Dylan went electric though

And don't forget that the old west and cowboys were hugely popular in the 1950s. Certainly since the advent of TV, and probably radio, the people running the stations have had their childhoods (or their parents childhoods) reflected in the mediums.

I'd hazard a guess that astronaut/sci-fi themed culture was equal in proportion to the westerns. Also, you could interpret the 1950s-western as merely American hegemony taking a post-war victory lap or alternatively as comfort food for a spooked American hegemony in the throes of uncertainty.

all of this shit is just making me think even more that there is no such thing as retromania its all just made up and depends where you stand on the hillside as to how far away things appear to be

^ think this is p otm, though it probably comes & goes in waves, like most things

Agreed. In the LA Review of Books podcast interview Reynolds talks a bit about moving to Los Angeles and finding Hollywood filled with fake nostalgia and I wondered a bit about how much of his crankiness is fueled by his move.

eh it's not just nostalgia and revivalism he's talking about, which yeah happens in every era, but a lack of innovation and originality compared to previous decades - which I think he has a point on (well ...actually i'm seeing some mutation in certain undergrounds but not in the mainstream, which at best is 'now' at times but not exactly new)

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