Simon Reynolds: Retromania
Faber and Faber (2012)
I.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Simon Reynolds's celebrated book on pop culture's addiction to its own recent past: Retromania.
So that seems like a good excuse to dust off my trusty yellow paperback edition [a] and reread its 450-odd pages divided into three main sections - the first two given the Savilesque titles 'Now' and 'Then' and the third designated 'Tomorrow' which, I suppose, is now our present - reassessing its arguments as I go along.
Let's begin, however, by discussing the book's front matter: an Introduction that poses the crucial question: "Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is ... its past?" [ix]; followed by a Prologue which considers the concepts nostalgia and retro which are central to the study.
II.
I've always loved this opening sentence: "We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration." [ix]
For whilst some younger readers might consider it inappropriate to casually use terms referring to mental health issues in such a jocular manner, I admire Reynolds's light-hearted writing style and do not believe for one moment that he's an ableist (though he does seem to also have a liking for the slang term lame, which is regrettable).
Like me, Reynolds belongs to another (perhaps less sensitive and politically less correct) generation; one that studied T. S. Eliot at school and so produces sentences such as "This is the way that pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set ..." [ix] in an attempt to be amusing, not intellectually intimidating or elitist.
Still, we're here to discuss pop's loss of dynamic energy and temporal sluggishness, not Gen Z's wokeness and the shift in linguistic standards since 2011, so let's push on ...
It's hard not to agree with this:
"Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be [...] dominated by the 're-' prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments." [xi]
Or this:
"Too often with new young bands, beneath their taut skin and rosy cheeks you could detect the sagging grey flesh of old ideas." [xi]
And I suppose I understand (though don't quite share) Reynolds's (quasi-Nietzschean) anxiety about the "uses and abuses of the pop past" [xiii] and the way in which retro has become democratised and mainstream. For these days anyone can play with the past and dip into the historical dress-up box, whereas retro used to be the "preserve of aesthetes, connoisseurs and collectors" [xii], i.e., individuals who self-consciously expressed themselves "through pastiche and citation [...] combined with a sharp sense of irony" [xii-xiii].
Reynolds is not quite saying that it's okay for wealthy, well-educated people to go in for period stylisation and antiquarianism, but unhealthy for the hoi polloi to be fascinated by the "fashions, fads, sounds and stars" [xiv] of their own youth, but he appears to regard retromania as a form of digital decadence leading us to the abyss.
It feels, he says, "like we've reached some kind of tipping point" [xiv] and face cultural catastrophe; not just the end of pop music, but innovative new work in other areas too, such as theatre, film and fashion. Even toys and games and food fads are now retro: "But strangest of all is the demand for retro porn" [xviii] [b].
Is that really so strange though? And is retro-consciousness really so wrong or harmful?
I mentioned the almost Nietzschean feel to Reynolds's argument that pop music ought to be all about the present - that "the essence of pop is the exhortation to 'be here now', meaning both 'live like there's no tomorrow' and 'shed the shackles of yesterday'" [xix] - and this really does echo the German philosopher's insistence that history must serve the needs of life (with the latter understood to be creative, vigorous action in the present) [c].
Nietzsche's warning that an excess of historical knowledge can produce historisches Fieber and that this can paralyse individuals and cultures, is pretty much what Reynolds is warning of retromania. I suppose that this is why it's so vital that we have the capacity to forget. But in the era of YouTube - which he discusses in chapter 2 of his book - how can we ever do that?
As Reynolds notes:
"All the sound and imagery and information that used to cost money and physical effort to obtain is available for free [...] We've become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data." [xx-xxi]
I can't recall if Nietzsche blames any group of people in particular for the oversaturation of 19th century life with history - I think he holds the education system and German culture collectively responsible - but I do know Reynolds blames hipsters for inculcating retromania as the "dominant sensibility and creative paradigm" [xix] in the early 21st century:
"The very people who you would once have expected to produce (as artists) or champion (as consumers) the non-traditional and the groundbreaking - that's the group who are most addicted to the past." [xix-xx]
After all, why be cutting-edge, when you can just press the replay button; why be a creator, when you can be a curator? "The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde" [xx] - for it's so much less demanding to fall back into the safety of the past than step forward into an unknown future.
All this being said, Reynolds now adds an important qualification (and makes a necessary confession):
"Retromania is not a straightforward denunciation of retro as a manifestation of cultural regression or decadence. How could it be, when I'm complicit myself [...] as a historian, as a reviewer of reissues, as a talking head in rock documentaries and as a sleeve note writer." [xxi]
Indeed, even as a music fan, he's complicit and as "addicted to retrospection as anybody" [xxii] - however, and this is why Reynolds can be characterised as a romantic optimist at heart - as much as he gives in to the "lure of the past", he pines (Mark Fisher-like) for "the future that's gone AWOL" [xxii].
In other words, Reynolds still believes that mañana es otro día ... If only because, deep down, he feels that retro is ultimately "lame and shameful" [xxiii] - the kind of informal moralism that his readers have come to anticipate.
III.
Does anyone else find it a little odd (and a little unnecessary) to follow an introduction with a prologue in a work of non-fiction? Still, I'm not complaining; if Mr Reynolds wishes to further set the scene, define terms, and provide a little more (political and philosophical) context to his study, then that's fine with me.
His brief history of nostalgia as word and concept - starting as a spatial-geographical condition (the ache of displacement) before becoming a temporal condition (the longing for a lost time) - is certainly appreciated [d] and Reynolds is right to remind his readers that nostalgia "hasn't always served the forces of conservatism" [xxvi]; that radical movements often dream too of restoring a golden age.
But let's get back to the world of pop and one of the key passages in the Prologue:
"In the second half of the twentieth century, nostalgia became steadily more and more bound up with popular culture [... and] is now thoroughly entwined with the consumer-entertainment complex: we feel pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and distractions that filled up our youth. Eclipsing individual pursuits (like hobbies) or participatory local activities (like amateur sports), the mass media and pop culture take up an ever-increasing proportion of our mental lives." [xxix-xxx]
Memory, in other words, is now colonised and exploited by capitalism as a resource and the past is mined (rather than idealised or revered) as a source of pleasure and profit. It's not just pop that eats itself, we too cannibalise and consume our own lives; the symbol of retromania is surely the ouroboros (the serpent which swallows its own tail).
But where does the term retro come from? Reynolds dismisses the idea that it's a linguistic spin-off of the Space Age and its retro-rockets and suggests, rather, that it is merely a detached prefix. He also stresses that for most people it's something of a dirty word; too associated with "camp, irony and mere trendiness" [xxxii].
I'm not quite sure why these things are thought more negatively than "musty, mouldering old stuff" [xxxii], but guess Reynolds is probably right to say that they signify "a shallow, surface-oriented attunement to style, as opposed to a deep, passionate love of a music scene's essence" [xxxii].
But that's precisely why, despite sharing some concerns, I would choose retro pop over prog rock and prefer to hang out at 430 King's Road rather than Louis Balfour's Jazz Club. Ultimately, this means rejecting even the austere monarchy of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and privileging The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in all its anarchic eclecticism [e].
I suppose what I'm admitting here is that I prefer fashion, ideas, images, and chaos over music (be it recorded and played on the radio or performed live by the actual musicians), whilst strongly suspecting that Reynolds loves music above all other art forms and, indeed, all other things [f]. Which is fine: but it's where he and I differ and one can't help wondering if, in fact, retro isn't a moral and cultural danger, but a valid aesthetic form of its own ...?
Notes
[a] All page references given in the main text are to this edition.
[b] See the post: 'On the Pleasure of Queer Nostalgia' (3 April 2015): click here.
[c] See Nietzsche's essay 'On the uses and disadvantages of history for life', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57-123. See also Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), a work cited by Reynolds - see the long footnote in bold on pp. 26-28.
[d] I'm particularly grateful for the reference to Svetlana Boym's work on reflective nostalgia versus restorative nostalgia, in The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2002).
[e] Reynolds makes much the same point I'm trying to make, but refers to the schism in the British folk scene between purists and those who are rather less militant in their asceticism; see pp. xxxiii-xxxv.
[f] In an interview from way back in 2006, Reynolds attempts to explain why he has devoted so much of his time and energy to writing about music and taking music seriously (as opposed to literature or film). Partly, he says, it's because rock music was the most powerful cultural force when he was a teenager and partly it's because he believes music to be the most democratic art form. Also, there's something almost magical about music:
"It meshed with everything. It connected to politics, it connected to all the other arts [...] Music was [...] the thing that gave a bit extra to whatever you were doing and you wanted to have some connection to it. [...] Music was definitely both the centre of everything and what took you to other things and connected you to other things. [...] But, to me, music was the only thing really worth being excited about."
See 'Simon Reynolds: interview by Wilson Neate', Part 1 of 2 (Feb 2006), in the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever: click here.
To read part 2 of this post on Retromania, please click here.
Parts 3 and 4 will follow in due course ...
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