Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past

Description

The first book to make sense of 21st Century pop, Retromania explores rock's nostalgia industry of revivals, reissues, reunions and remakes, and argues that there has never before been a culture so obsessed with its own immediate past. Pulling together parallel threads from music, fashion, art, and new media, Simon Reynolds confronts a central paradox of our era: from iPods to YouTube, we're empowered by mind-blowing technology, but too often it's used as a time machine or as a tool to shuffle and rearrange music from yesterday. We live in the digital future but we're mesmerized by our analogue past.

Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, The Sex Revolts: Gender Rebellions and Rock and Roll (cowritten with Joy Press), Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 and, most recently, Bring The Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock.

"If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music, it would have to be-on the basis of knowledge, range of reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of style-Simon Reynolds." -GEOFF DYER, author of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi" "Amazing." --Bruce Sterling, Wired.com "Looking back over the last 25 years you'd be hard pressed to name a music journalist more adept at tracking and defining the zeitgeist." --Dave Haslam, "The Guardian" "Simon Reynolds, one of our most thoughtful music writers, poses a stark question for anyone who cares about the future of pop . . . A devastating critique of the way music is now consumed." --Patrick Sawer, "The Daily Telegraph" "Bracingly sharp. As a work of contemporary historiography, a thick description of the transformations in our relationship to time--as well as to place--"Retromania" deserves to be very widely read." --Sukhdev Sandhu, "The Observer" (London) "A provocative and original inquiry into the past and future of popular music." --"Booklist" (starred review) "[A] mix of canny erudition, critical theory, stylish prose, and vibrant evocations." --"Publishers Weekly" "Important--and alarming--reading for pop-music aficionados." --"Kirku "If I had to choose just one commentator to guide me through the last quarter-century of popular (and not so popular) music, it would have to be--on the basis of knowledge, range of reference, soundness of judgment, and fluency of style--Simon Reynolds." --GEOFF DYER, author of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi""If pop music is all about right now, what happens when the past refuses to go quietly? The ever-brilliant Simon Reynolds investigates the cult of retro, the temptations of nostalgia, and the future of music culture--all with a detective's cold eye and a fan's hot heart." --ROB SHEFFIELD, author of "Love Is a Mix Tape" "One of my favorite music writers wrestles one of my favorite musical paradoxes: What's up with the fetish for the Old in pop's Land of the Eternal New? Unpacking how YouTube makes history more lateral than linear, pondering the remarkable endurance of England's Northern Soul scene, or wondering if record collecting is indeed a distinctly masculine sickne