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Retromania
Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
Book Summary
We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups ... But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?
This book is about:
- Popular music,
- Music,
- Popular culture,
- History and criticism,
- History,
- Social aspects
NPR stories about Retromania
Best Books Of 2011
Staff Picks: The Best Music Books Of 2011
Simon Reynolds' thesis sounds pretty alarmist at first glance: The collective appetite for nostalgia, he argues, is killing innovation and turning pop culture into a museum unto itself. But the big picture isn't what's so engaging about Retromania: It's the details that sell Reynolds' painstaking exploration of how we got to this point.
The book surveys the revival cults of popular music's past — "trad jazz" in postwar America, the ongoing British obsession with 1960s soul —... more
—Daoud Tyler-Ameen
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