AN AMBIVALENT INDICTMENT Simon Reynolds & Retromania
Nov 25, 2011
"The axis of time has flipped, and the past has displaced the future in the cultural imagination": the British journalist explains.
BY LOGAN K. YOUNG
If Greil Marcus were right, ours should have been a true blank generation. Some twenty years after Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, in Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, Simon Reynolds sees the fledgling 21st for what it really is. And his diagnosis may scare you. At 500 scintillating pages, Reynolds' Retromania is a virtuosic dossier on how, if we don't push forward, the entirety of civilized culture will eventually self-destruct. Stuck between the year we make contact and the year the Mayans have us going silent, indeed, looking back looks pretty vacant right now.
BLURT recently caught up with Reynolds in between book tours to see if things really are as bleak as they seem. And because this is Simon Reynolds, he, of course, had a lot to say. (Go here to read our review of Retromania, published earlier this year by Faber & Faber.)
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BLURT: Now that the reviews are in, what's the biggest criticism of Retromania that you've found unfair or unfounded?
SIMON REYNOLDS: That the book is one long grouch. It's fairly clear, at least if you've actually read it, that I'm as fascinated and intrigued by retro culture as I am alarmed and disgusted. And as I make explicit upfront, I am also involved in the culture myself, as a fan who obsessively pores over rock history and who loves certain retromaniacal artists, but also professionally, through reviewing reissues, being in rock docs and so forth. So I would describe the book as "an ambivalent indictment."
The other angle that some reviewers put forth that I find suspect is this notion that recycling and derivativeness have always part of pop culture. I think this is symptomatic of the very syndrome I'm critiquing: there's an inability to believe or even imagine that there was ever anything unprecedented or out of the blue in music. But rock history - indeed popular culture history, in general - is teeming with examples of things that are "new under the sun." The artists in question usually start from something - they have primary influences and sources that they wrestle with - but very quickly they take those influences to totally unexpected and radically new places. The Beatles, obviously, but James Brown, Miles Davis, Kraftwerk, Giorgo Moroder, Talking Heads, Chic, etc. And whole genres: roots/dub, reggae, electro, techno, jungle, etc.
Have you noticed a difference between the British versus the American response? To wit, your latest book tour is booked for Spain.
There were some really intelligent reviews in Britain but, good or bad, they were generally rather argumentative. Often the reviewers seemed affronted by the premise. I noticed that this was coming often from people whose main job is as a newspaper's chief weekly reviewer of new releases. Now Retromania is a book that would interfere with the functioning of that kind of generalist, week-in-week-out reviewer, because to do that job you need to be relentlessly positive and always convinced that there's great stuff out there. I think you'd probably be having to fight against ennui and "seen it all before" jadedness on a weekly basis, doing that job, especially at this time.
The American reviews have sometimes taken issue with aspects of the book, but they've overall been much more well thought out and balanced. I can't complain about the responses, as it is a book designed to provoke debate and disagreement. I just went to Italy, where the book has received a great response. I'm hoping to get to France, Germany and the Spanish-reading world (the book is coming out via a publisher in Argentina) next year.
Given your similarly encyclopedic studies of rave culture, post-punk and even gender in music, when did you first become aware of "retromania" as an affliction? I can't imagine the idea came separate from them?
My editor in the U.K., Lee Brackstone, said something at one of the London events about how Retromania was the last volume in a sort of trilogy that started with Energy Flash (a.k.a. Generation Ecstasy) and continued with Rip It Up and Start Again. I had never thought of that before but it makes sense: Energy Flash is about the nineties as one long future-rush, and Rip It Up is about growing up during post-punk, and how that would make me the kind of person who would embrace rave and techno as a renaissance for the modernist spirit in music. And then Retromania is about what happened to those energies when we actually reached the future, which is to say the 21st century. It's a history of the present, meaning the 11 or 12 years of the 2000s and early 2010s.
When I was looking back over my old writings to see if there was anything I could re-purpose for Retromania, I was struck by how often - and by how early - retro had been a preoccupation. Even in an essay on the parlous state of music in 1985 that I wrote in our fanzine Monitor, there's a reference to the glut of reissues. Later on I would be writing in Melody Maker about bands I loved that were very obviously influenced by the sixties, but trying to imagine them as the start of something new rather than a faint echo of a lost golden age. That took some rhetorical effort, as you can imagine. It's definitely been there as a concern right from almost the start: the accumulating burden of rock's own history, and how that becomes an insidious mindset of reference and reverence. I think my generation inherited a sense of belatedness, that we were after the sixties and most of us had missed punk, too. So there was a kind of struggle to outflank that condition of being the epigone.
You mention artists like Ariel Pink that are doing a great job of synthesizing influence, but what about those who are truly blazing a unique path? Any endorsements?
I think Oneohtrix Point Never has done certain things that seem to be pretty untaggable, alongside other pieces that are working with a very eighties sound-palette that recalls at various points: New Age, space music and Jon Hassell's Fourth World records. I'm also digging the albums by Joker and Rustie. I enjoy the sense of scale and hyper-gloss in their tracks. "Micro" is done with, worn out, as a strategy in electronic music; it's time for some Macro. Most of the stuff that catches my ear and enchants me seems to be stuff that is vaguely evocative of some or other past - or mingled pasts - but without specifically and consciously invoking artists or styles from yesteryear. So I really dug the Metronomy album The English Riviera, which is not exactly new but it's hard to tag it to any specific era, and it feels fresh. They remind in that respect of Vampire Weekend. Also been enjoying music by Laurel Halo and Maria Minerva, which is equally vague in its evocations.
That said, I do really enjoy stuff that is playing games with specific styles from the past, people like James Ferraro, the artists on Not Not Fun. At the end, though, I am always craving and searching for that sound that completely disorients and astounds, which you can't place in a scheme of reference. There's certain footwork tracks on the Bangs & Works compilations that Planet Mu have done - this subculture of rough, weird beats for very peculiar dancing, produced by Chicago youngsters - that give me this "shock of the new/now" sensation. I get that feeling - not so much sonically, but more in terms of spirit and attitude - from certain of Ke$ha's records, like "We R Who We R." The eternal present of the teenage, reinvented for the 21st Century.
Indeed, the crisis of looking back is an existential one. And yet, we're all - as a culture totale - complicit in it. What's the habit we most need to drop, then, to become a highly progressive people?
Oh, I don't know. I certainly think critics could stop making excuses for "non-creative garbage" (to borrow a line from Monty Python). They could be a bit more stern and judgemental. But the problem starts at an earlier stage than mediation or critical filtration. Obviously, the problem is not that people are less talented these days. It's much more macro and structural, a change in the base-line conditions in which culture is made. In an essay I did for The Wire that paralleled the book and expanded on its themes, I wrote in near mystical terms about how the axis of time has flipped, and the past has displaced the future in the cultural imagination. I do think something like that has happened in terms of the archival universe that is the internet. This is why Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have been riffing on "atemporality" as a byproduct or effect of network culture. The internet and digital culture has interfered with our very sense of culture-time. It's no longer uni-linear, heading into the future, the unknown.
Finally, have you seen Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris? Parts of it sounded just like a page from Retromania.
I haven't seen it yet, but it does sound like it overlaps uncannily with stuff talked about in the prologue, where I'm discussing the concept of nostalgia. If it had come out a year earlier, it would have been a gift to me in terms of something to write about in the book. This cinematic season has seen a couple of releases that chime with Retromania. Well, more than a couple, if you want to talk about the latest crop of remakes, but specifically Super 8, which is riddled with "dead media" references, has the Spielberg-homage/eighties-nostalgia aspect, and is, to use a British expression, a load of cobblers. And then Drive, which I've not seen, but which sounds like it's incredibly referential in terms of movie history. Paul Morley on the U.K. TV show Late Review said it was a movie all about being cool, and so completely uncool. That had the ring of truth to me. I suspect it is coming from the Tarantino school: visually ravishing, narratively thrilling, superbly acted, but utterly empty. A meta-movie.
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