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

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.

http://asset-server.libsyn.com/item/1527739/assets/gunpoint.jpg

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.)

Don't forget that Dylan, Baez etc. in the early 60s were part of the Folk Revival.

missed xhuxk's post

I don't know the exact timeline, but I think White Album/Beggars Banquet/Band/Creedence/etc. led to Lennon's Live Peace Show in Toronto (w/Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, and Bo Diddley) and Richard Nader's revival shows, which in turn led to Sha Na Na/Flash Cadillac/Cat Mother & the All-Night Newsboys, which then led naturally into American Graffiti and Happy Days. I'm sure it wasn't quite that cut-and-dried, but I think there was more or less a direct line there.

eh, black sabbath's first album is lousy with blues riffing but it's hard to imagine it as revivalism

which begs the question would we recognize the revolutionary even if it were in our midst

bangs take on the first sabbath album was "this is bad cream" iirc

xpost: I think the 2,000+ posts on the Rebecca Black thread prove that we're just totally on top of that.

amateurism is the future of music, discuss

FWIW: It's pretty amusing that everything on this thread so far is discussed in the book.

Well, everything bar Rebecca Black, Xeno & Oaklander and The Eurythmics. [XP]

He mentions Oldies But Goodies and the early '60s Italo-American doo-wop revival?? Wow, maybe I should get the book.

I get the feeling new generations will carbon date pop culture w/game systems and other technology rather than music. Stylistic changes in pop music have felt really minimal for the last 15 years imho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31-BycUUq0M

Graphic design is the most likely and rewarding form of pop culture carbon dating imo. It's also a form which is forever borrowing from the past, but somehow the actual era is never in doubt.

Like both of this book's covers are very now, in their different ways.

Graphic design is the most likely and rewarding form of pop culture carbon dating imo. It's also a form which is forever borrowing from the past, but somehow the actual era is never in doubt.

So what happens when both music and books no longer appear in material form? How will something show its age as an MP3/ pdf/ or whatever replaces them?

your book has a cover lol dated

I'm always obsessed with this stuff (ie, Weezer's "Buddy Holly" being 90s worship of 70s TV show that worshipped 50s culture), but every time I write about it, it seems really clinical and unfun and kind of tedious (cf, many of the first 100 posts in this thread, no offense). I'm kind of interested to see if Reynolds can make this readable, dig?

Graphic design is the most likely and rewarding form of pop culture carbon dating imo. It's also a form which is forever borrowing from the past, but somehow the actual era is never in doubt.

I like this statement but you could swap out music or film or fashion and still be otm

How could anyone possibly take offense at being called unfun and kind of tedious?

hey i am truly sorry if i helped steer the conversation away from "lol, that cover sucks." i don't apologize for being tedious though. i want to cultivate a more tedious approach in my old age.