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

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