Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (review)

Simon Reynolds is a prominent journalist of popular music with a substantial record of publication to his name. Retromania, his most recent book, explores one of the most important facets of contemporary popular culture: the ongoing “uses and abuses of the pop past” (p. xiii). Reynolds touches on this trend as manifested in various cultural forms—fashion, television, movies, theater—but the spotlight is squarely on music. In this way, the book’s rather general subtitle and front cover illustration (on the American version, the upper half of a person decked out in assorted bygone clothes and accessories, each accompanied by decade-specifying markers) are a bit misleading.

Retromania largely deals with popular music since the millennium, although it also offers a good amount of commentary on music dating back to the 1960s. (Reynolds dates the point in time at which musical retro began—“‘the Rift of Retro’”—to the mid-sixties, p. 185.) “Retro,” according to the author, describes “pretty much anything that relates to the relatively recent past of popular culture” (p. xiii). Working under such a broad definition, the book has a lot of ground to cover, and at nearly five hundred pages, Retromania seems to want to tackle absolutely everything relevant to the central theme. One could easily criticize the author for failing to reach this unattainable goal, or, conversely, for not focusing on fewer issues in the interest of succinctness. Yet Reynolds does an admirable job of engaging a slew of intricate issues, even if the text reads like a long series of short articles on a dozen or so related topics, without a strong sense of linear flow. The text’s serial quality is exacerbated by the presence of sixteen subsections printed at the bottom of certain pages throughout the book; set off by smaller, darker font, these subsections function as extremely long explanatory footnotes, elaborating on points brought up in the main passages. The book features no actual footnotes or endnotes; “footnotes and additional material” are said to be found at a web address (http://retromaniafootnotes.blogspot.com) given in the table of contents (p. viii), yet as of the writing of this review (December 2011) no footnotes were to be found at this site (the book was published in July).

The various issues explored include those of musical style (e.g., sample-based music, fifties-nostalgic pop-rock from the seventies), recreations (e.g., reenactments of celebrated concerts, Japanese bands covering all manner of Western popular genres), collections (e.g., rock’n’roll museums, compact disc box sets), and digital technology (e.g., MP3s, YouTube). By way of these and other topics, the book surveys backward-looking tendencies from the past few decades in an attempt to show how music from 2000 onward hasn’t been retro in the right way. Compared with previous eras, the twenty-first century has so far produced music that lacks the proper “mixture of anguish [over] and reverence [for]” its predecessors; recent retro has managed only to drain the past of its “mystery and magic” (p. 425). Mash-ups, one of the most notable musical genres to emerge from the last decade, are derided by Reynolds for “mash[ing] the history of pop like potatoes, into indistinct, digital-data-grey pulp, a blood-sugar blast of empty carbohydrate energy, flava-less and devoid of nutritional value. . . . This is a barren genre—nothing will come from it” (p. 360).

It’s not just the music itself that disgruntles Reynolds. An unapologetic Luddite (although he never self-identifies as one), the author accepts contemporary methods of musical consumption only reluctantly. Online archives of music (e.g., YouTube) are “a barely navigable disorder of data-debris and memory-trash” (p. 27); the iPod is “freakish,” “an emblem of the poverty of abundance” (p. 115). Current technologies make us less-good listeners, although Reynolds believes this sad state of affairs has been a couple of decades in the...