Retromania [Paperback]

Simon Reynolds is one of the best, if not the best, pop music historians alive. An outstanding writer with a superhuman work ethic and encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly the entirety of pop history, he's written the definitive histories of two important musical movements-- electronica, in Generation Ecstasy, and post-punk, in Rip It Up and Start Again-- both of which I enjoyed. The man is indisputably brilliant.

That said, I feel that Reynolds was the wrong man for the present job, namely: making sense of the retro-fueled 2000's.

The crux of the problem is that Reynolds doesn't like or doesn't seem to "get" most of the decade's music and technology, including the iPod, MP3s, Mashup, and the Internet in general:

* On the Internet: "the result, visible above all on the Internet, is that the archive degenerates into the anarchive: a barely navigable disorder of data-debris and memory-trash."

* On the iPod: "I was very resistant, partly because I was never that keen on the Walkman (I don't like to be insulated from the sounds of the city as I pass through it; equally, I dislike the way the outside noise interferes with the music)... [The iPod is] an emblem of the poverty of abundance."

* On MP3s: "music to MP3 is a bit like the concentration process, and it's done for much the same reason: it's much cheaper to transport concentrate because without the water it takes up a lot less volume and it weighs a lot less. Yet we can all taste the difference."

The Internet is "barely navigable"? Not since Google. The iPod is a "poverty of abundance"? That's surely not as bad as lugging a Discman around again. Sure, MP3s sounded like crap in the days of 128 kbps rips from Napster, but those days are long gone. Bottom line: Is a man who dislikes the iPod really the best person to chronicle the past decade of music?

Those bigger issues aside, the book is too easy to put down. Only two Amazon reviews two months after publication? I strongly suspect that readers are having a hard time getting through it, as I did. Not that everything should be easy to understand, but at 500 pages the book is far too long for the tenuous and uncertain conclusions Reynolds reaches. He skips from genre to genre and band to band with only loose and unsatisfactory theories to bind the narrative. They are:

- No music from the 2000's was remotely as good as the best albums from previous decades.
- Retro has killed true innovation.
- The technological marvels of the decade have not made our music significantly better. Just flashier.

And Reynolds is by no means wrong. He's largely right. But did he really need 500 pages to say it all?

Outsiders are often the cultural critics who have the ability to see and summarize the big picture (e.g. Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, de Tocqueville), but here I think an insider is rather what we need, someone to blaze a cohesive and clear path through the tangle of the 2000s.

Maybe such a path doesn't exist, but surely Reynolds missed a major opportunity by his summary dismissal of Mashup. Which is surprising, because the real story of Mashup-- a bunch of mostly British weirdos laboring in obscurity whose work suddenly blew up and was immediately absorbed by the mainstream-- sounds exactly like all the stories Reynolds normally seems to like, namely those of punk, electronica, and 60's rock. Reynolds dismisses Mashup as a "fad," "a barren genre-- nothing will come from it." Yet half the decade's pop music grew from the seeds Mashup planted, from Madonna's "Hung Up" through Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas, much of Kanye, Katy Perry and the current genre gumbo we find ourselves in.

All those criticisms aside, there is much to praise in Retromania. In can be exhausting, but if you're willing to roll with Reynolds' poetic meanderings, he can be a pretty fascinating idea factory. I did enjoy his descriptions of certain bands and genres, including his summary of Shibuya-kei (which may be the best one in print, even if I disagree with some of his conclusions). In sum, even though I find this book hard to love, I admire it, and Reynolds does lay out a wide variety of theoretical tools and approaches that we and hopefully future critics can build upon in the (perhaps hopeless) quest to make some kind of sense of the decade in pop.

"Retromania" is a long, extensive thought-piece on the rise to dominance of "retro" culture by the expat British pop critic Simon Reynolds (b. 1963). While Reynolds looks at the influence of retro in many areas of culture, from fashion to cinema to television, the real focus is on pop music. As we are living through a (permanent?) high tide of retro, it is impossible to fully understand as it seems to swamp every aspect of our cultural lives, so it's hardly surprising that Reynolds seems at times puzzled by the phenomenon. But he approaches the topic with intelligence, honesty, an almost bizarrely extensive knowledge of pop music history, and also a flair for writing. I found the book to be fascinating and I am sure I will be reflecting on the ideas Reynolds presents in the future. Finally, I found Reynolds to be a pleasant critic with whom to explore this topic - he isn't grating in the way so many critics can be, which is no mean feat.

I have a couple of comments and criticisms but let me start by summarizing the various parts of this sprawling and idea-filled book:

Reynolds lays out the initial approach to "retro" in his introduction, wittily titled "The `Re' Decade." What is retro? Reynolds later on presents a parsing of the word when covering 1960s fashion. Writers on fashion differentiate between "historicism", which is inspired by styles from a fairly remote time period (say, the Edwardian period), and "retro", the self-conscious remaking of art initially made within living memory (e.g. writing a song that sounds just like Alice in Chains' 90s output). Reynolds rightly comments that the two categories flow into each other and points out how the 2000s (which he calls the "noughties") involved the recycling of every style. He senses that this re-cycling has overwhelmed the forward- or inward-looking creative impulse and wonders why this urge to recycle has become so strong and whether it portends a poverty of artistic creativity: "Is nostalgia stopping our culture's ability to surge forward or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward?" Then he quotes the eclectic songwriter Sufjan Stevens: "Rock and roll is a museum piece." Reynolds returns to a general reflection of the issue in his concluding chapter "The Shock of the Old", where he meditates on why he is so uncomfortable with the retro phenomenon. But note that this book is an examination and not polemical commentary.

In between, he covers many topics: the resurgence of reunion tours and retrospective recording issuances in the 2000s, the influence of digital copying on the creation of a shallow grazing culture among listeners and viewers (I could write an entire review about this interesting chapter), record collecting in the age of cheap digital copies, the rise of "curators" specializing in all byways of pop music and other art forms, and the fact that this retro consciousness actually manifested itself in Japan in the 1980s, before its full rise to prominence in Europe and the Americas. There's a very interesting chapter on fashion in the 1960s, on the 1950s revival (which never ends), use of music samples and the reaction to retro-mania, involving a desire for greater orientation towards the future.

In examining the subject, Reynolds deploys not only his extensive knowledge of pop music (and I mean extensive - this book gave me a full picture of all this music I will never hear - which is actually one of the themes in the section on technology and record collecting) but also insights by well-known writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, of course, and also applies Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" idea.

Reynolds is a snappy, stylish writer. For example: "Metastasis, the word for the spread of disease through the body, inadvertently pinpoints the malaise of postmodern pop: there is a profound connection between meta-ness (referentiality, copies of copies) and stasis (the sensation that pop history has come to a halt)." Nice phrase turning there.

I'm just scratching the surface of a rich book, one that has been written out of passionate interest. I have a couple of comments that I will briefly add before recommending that you order this book and read it. First, I wish Reynolds had paid more attention to demographics. We live in a weird culture where adolescent musical tastes are retained seemingly in perpetuity into old age. The fact that the developed world is in the midst of a major transition as the swollen post-war generation ages and assumes a majority status is logically going to have a big effect on cultural trends, given this retention of tastes. Reynolds is seemingly oblivious to this, based on his extensive references to punk and post-punk music. Punk to me is a minor footnote to music history (I give the bands credit for humor and not taking themselves seriously), but the point is that Reynolds grew up with this music and refers back to it constantly, seemingly out of all proportion to its interest. This constant thinking about punk is natural, given the retention of tastes and Reynolds' demographic. But a twenty-something referencing punk today is going to mean something quite a bit different from when Reynolds does. So one of the interesting things about current retro culture is how influential it is on young people, who re-create the 60s or 70s without having lived through them. I wish Reynolds had been more focussed on this distinction. Also, note how Japan - the harbinger of our demographic shift - indulged in retromania in the 1980s (oh oh). Secondly, I wish Reynolds had spent some time thinking and listening to an echo of the retro phenomenon in the classical musical world, the emergence of neoclassicism (a word which only briefly appears in the book) in the early 20th century (e.g. Igor Stravinsky work in the 1920-30s). I think a look farther back in history would have provided a bit of context. Third, Reynolds puzzlingly doesn't devote enough time to rap and hip-hop, which exhibit many retro traits and are an important part of our current ahistoricity and retromania. But these quibbles didn't interfere with my appreciating Reynolds' thoughtfulness and ability to integrate materials and thoughts.

"Retromania" is a fascinating book which I think you will like.

This is certainly a book for those who that current popular music and popular culture in general seems to be lacking in originality and just wants to reinvent the past instead of the future. Reynolds does a great job of marshalling the evidence in form of the overwhelming number of reunion tours, rock documentaries and focus on the glory days of the past. However, he never really answers his own big question namely, why is music currently like this and is it a bad thing?

There are wonderful chapters that tie into the early retro-revivals like Northern Soul and another one about Japanese bands who do spot on sound and sigh renditions of previous anglo bands, hence Reynolds' statement that all of pop music is "Turning Japanese." However, he never seems to talk about the artists that really have come to define pop music. Even though the White Stripes and the Strokes getting passing references he never spends any time on either band, even though those two artists came to define the sound of 2000's rock and attitude. Nor does he spend anytime analyzing the current state of hip-hop, which he has written about extensively. While it can be argued that current hip-hop has gotten a bit lazy, its certainly not true that it is in any way trying to be retro (ie trying to sound like say 1992, or 1987 or what not.)

So in the end the book is a bit unsatisfying your get mini profiles of scenes and artists but no take on "what it all means."

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