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

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