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Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past (2011)

by Simon Reynolds(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0865479941 (ISBN13: 9780865479944)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Faber & Faber

review 1: At first I thought this book was going to be one of the best things I'd ever read, giving an insightful analysis, or at least a vivid analytical description, of the predicament of culture in the digital age, the age in which everything is recorded, recycled, permanently available, and everything can be discussed, admired or derided or remixed or mentioned by everyone and all those responses are added to the heap of secondary culture, while the primary stuff proliferates like (to use one of Reynold's images) metastatising cells but can only find narrow, or widely spread but thinly dispersed, acceptance because there's too much to take in, and all that jazz.It starts off with some of that, and pretty good it is too, but it seems to mutate, via some chapters on the history of... more retro elements in modern culture, into a random illustration of its theme in the form of the various particular enthusiasms of the author - which are semi-interesting, frankly: much more than Stuart Maconie's but not as much as mine.And I'm not sure if it's just me or if he's inordinately chuffed at having managed to settle in the US and become American? Not that there's anyhing wrong with that!
review 2: An excellent in-depth analysis of how we got where we are in pop music. It helps that I think a lot about the very same things Reynolds writes about, so this appeals to me - a lot. The stagnation, the spinning wheels, the endless recycling and repositioning of a handful of musical styles is sad, odd and maybe even inevitable. Got it form the library and didnt quite finish it, but I'm going to pick up a copy of this and re-read it form the get-go. This is important stuff for the music-obsessed. less

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