Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
By Simon Reynolds Faber, 458 pages, $18
Walk around any urban center in the Western Hemisphere and you'll eventually come upon someone dressed like a punk rocker. That look was codified as early as 1977, and yet 34 years later kids still replicate it to a (ripped) T. But in 1977, did you see bohemian youth attired like bobby-soxers from the '40s? Or think about any five-year span between 1955 and 1995—the changes in popular culture are sizable. But thereafter, and particularly in the 2000s, not so much. (click below to read more)
Innovation in pop music has been decelerating for years; in its place is an increasing preoccupation with the past. Some of the perpetrators over the past decade include Interpol (who vividly recall post-punk bands like Joy Division), Amy Winehouse ('60s pop-R&B, from Motown to Dusty Springfield), the Black Crowes (early-'70s Rolling Stones), and Oasis ("Revolver"-era Beatles). Any moderately well informed fan could name a dozen more. Perhaps the ultimate in retromania is Girl Talk, a one-man band whose party tunes are composed entirely of dozens of painstakingly collaged samples from pop history. This sort of approach, says British critic Simon Reynolds, mashes music into "indistinct, digital-data-grey pulp, a blood-sugar blast of empty carbohydrate energy."
But why is this happening? Mr. Reynolds explores the reasons—and a lot of other things—in "Retromania," a provocative and learned book about a "paradoxical combination of speed and standstill."
Mr. Reynolds asks: "Isn't there something profoundly wrong about the fact that so much of the greatest music made during the last decade sounds like it could have been made twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier?" It's not quite a rhetorical question, since he does make a good-faith effort to ascertain whether there is indeed something wrong. But his answer is: yes, probably.
It's fair to question whether "retromania" is anything new. Mr. Reynolds acknowledges that pop has long cannibalized its own past—recall the '50s craze of the '70s, or the early '80s Doors revival. ("He's hot, he's sexy, he's dead," Rolling Stone proclaimed about Jim Morrison in 1981.) But recently retro has gone from interest to obsession.
Today there are countless reunion tours, concerts in which bands play their classic albums in toto, rock museums, satellite radio stations playing era-specific music, deluxe reissue sets. A booming industry manufactures reproduction gear and software so that artists can more precisely mimic a vintage sound. The Internet and digital music formats have given rise to mash-ups—the juxtaposition of two or more songs (which Mr. Reynolds calls "a barren genre"). And then there is that rectangular black hole into the past, YouTube.
"Retromania" is written in a discursive style, like an epic-length magazine article. As Mr. Reynolds admits in his introduction, he's making it up as he goes along. Fortunately, the reader is in astute hands, and while the route isn't always the most direct one, it is filled with interesting diversions, including ruminations on the nature of boredom in the digital age and on the collector's impulse, while incorporating heady cultural theorists such as Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Bourdieu and Bourriaud (that's just the B's) as gently as possible.
In order to track "a slow but steady fading of the artistic imperative to be original . . . almost like some kind of generational deficiency of 'the anxiety of influence' kicked in," Mr. Reynolds undertakes a cultural odyssey: pilgrimages to sites like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; meetings with musicians like the new classical-music darling Nico Muhly, retro-pop maestro Ariel Pink and rock primitivist Billy Childish. He attends reunion concerts by Gang of Four and the New York Dolls and investigates retro enablers like "sharity blogs" (which post out-of-print music as digital files), picking apart all these phenomena with infectious enthusiasm and wide-ranging erudition.
There is no shortage of wildly innovative, truly progressive artists today, but they are exceptions that prove the rule, and so Mr. Reynolds insists on asking: "What makes actual young people stop chasing tomorrow's music today and pursue yesterday's music today?" His answer lies in the feedback loop between the modes of pop-culture production and consumption.
While pop's present is inevitably becoming an ever smaller proportion of its total history, a powerful accelerant arrived in the 2000s: the Internet and the instant availability of virtually all recorded music. (Even Mr. Reynolds admits that he downloads more music than he can ever listen to.) The result is a "glut of influences and images stifling young artists' ability to be original."
The author identifies 1965 as a kind of Year Zero for retromania, when pop slowly began to ditch modernism and started looking back. He cites "The White Album" and Frank Zappa's doo-wop pastiche, "Cruising With Ruben and the Jets" (both 1968) as the first postmodern albums. There is no small irony in the fact that the '60s, a period that prized rapid change, is now far more often imitated in form than in spirit. Same thing with punk rock: Its original intent—do what you want and damn the torpedoes—has been ignored, its earliest manifestations embraced as orthodoxy. "It is now pretty clear," Mr. Reynolds writes, "that pop is living on borrowed time and stolen energy, the deposits laid down in its generative prime."
Mr. Reynolds, 48, uses as his gold standard the music of his youth (post-punk) and the music that clinched his professional reputation (rave); he presents few, if any, upsides to the digitalization of music and instead remembers fondly his visits to the local record shop. So it is tempting to dismiss his dim view of contemporary pop as the all-too-typical plaint of an aging fan. But the evidence he presents is quite damning.
A pair of exhaustive lists of retro-oriented cultural items and events of the 2000s—such as Ang Lee's 2009 film, "Taking Woodstock," and the Flaming Lips releasing a track-by-track cover of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" that same year—bookend the text, making a compelling case that retromania not only exists but is increasingly defining popular culture. Or at least popular music: This book's subtitle is "Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past," but it focuses almost exclusively on music, paying scant attention to vastly more popular genres, including television, the movies or videogames (not to mention advertising).
Mr. Reynolds's exhaustive analysis also misses a few factors. For one, we're now into two or more generations of kids whose parents grew up on rock music. How do they develop their own taste when they enjoy essentially the same music that mom and dad listen to? Why innovate when you know it won't bother anybody?
Another big thing that Mr. Reynolds is forgetting: 9/11. That happened at the dawn of the 2000s, precisely when he believes pop music really began to atrophy. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the only people sanguine about the future were manufacturers of airport-security equipment.
For years afterward, popular music, even in the bohemian underground, harked back to the MTV-era childhoods of so many musicians and listeners; it was musical comfort food, safe as milk. As Mr. Reynolds notes, late '90s techno was "the last blast of full-tilt, irony-free futurism in mainstream pop." Ever since, pop has been marked by a lack of interest in, or even fear of, the future. Now the economy is in a ditch—not the most natural time to take chances on anything.
But Mr. Reynolds is correct that the main culprit remains instant and pervasive (and gratis) access to music. In the past, listeners established a deep and abiding connection to a personal portfolio of music that they had absorbed at an organic rate; now it's more like speed-dating. Instead of internalizing and interpreting (and inaccurately remembering in creatively productive ways), we're cutting and pasting. As a result, "most mainstream retro pop," Mr. Reynolds avers, "offers nostalgia with the 'algia'—the pain and regret—almost completely removed."
One effect of this loss of passion, both in musicians and fans, is a longing "for a lost golden age when music had power and integrity." Many bands make the mistake of copping the sounds of elder statesmen such as Bruce Springsteen, but just as putting on a Superman costume won't give you the ability to fly, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing in a quavering falsetto won't lend you the gravitas of Neil Young.
Yet after exhaustively analyzing various manifestations of retromania, Mr. Reynolds does uncover a hope for future progress: "Re-enactment may still have the power to remind the audience that Events are possible, because they've happened before." In other words, by examining yesterday's tomorrows, we may yet rekindle the modernist zest for invention and a sense of urgency.
Retromania may also be more indicative of our times than Mr. Reynolds gives it credit for. One of the great things about pop is that it can "distill the atmosphere of a historical era," as he puts it. But if contemporary pop primarily addresses the past, he wonders, how can it possibly distill its own era? The funny thing is, retro-pop still does: as the embodiment of a gluttonous reaction to suddenly unfettered access to the past. That is what will mark today's popular music, as well as this entire historical era.
But all this would be just fodder for interesting party conversations and much-commented Facebook status updates were it not for this statement by the brilliant cultural theorist Jacques Attali: "Music is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society." That music has stopped changing, Mr. Reynold suggests, reflects something gravely amiss in the wider culture. Sounding like Oswald Spengler (whom he in fact alludes to), Mr. Reynolds sees retromania as the leading edge of a fin de siècle cultural morbidity. "When you look at the culture of the West in the last decade or so—the dominance of fashion and gossip, celebrity and image; a citizenry obsessed with décor and cuisine; the metastasis of irony throughout society—the total picture does look a lot like decadence."
This leads to one of Mr. Reynolds's most astute observations: an analogy between the Western economy and popular music in which both are in a "post-production" mode, shifting away from manufacturing raw materials and instead manipulating them. He goes on to cite a dichotomy between "culture" and "civilization": The former generates musical forms (blues, country, reggae, hip-hop), and the latter refines and recombines them, but with "detachment and irony."
So where does pop go from here, stuck in its retro rut? Mr. Reynolds feels that the West might be played out but that the rapid changes in developing societies like China, India and Brazil—nations that are making things instead of merely reconfiguring them—might provide pop culture's new lifeblood. In the book's final words, he writes: "I still believe the future is out there." He's right, of course, but one thing's for sure: it will not arrive in the form of a kid with a mohawk and a motorcycle jacket.
—Mr. Azerrad is the author of "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground" (Little, Brown).
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