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

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It was outdated almost from the moment it was published, shiny modernism was not exactly in short supply throughout the 10s and many of its biggest artists couldn't have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