Read: Simon Reynolds’ Retromania

Recently published by Faber & Faber, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past finds the author waxing more than just a little bit anti-nostalgic.

By Logan K. Young

Back in 1990, Greil Marcus saw the 20th century as a patina of punk gobsmacked on an entire epoch. Some twenty years in the future, Simon Reynolds sees the fledgling 21st more a patois of post-punk's postures. With the narrative obliterated, representational painting cubed and even film abstracted so long ago - all "punk" manifestations of modernity - we waste now wanting for Godot's return. If Marcus were right, this should've been a true blank generation; apropos of Attali, all the rest since should have been noise. Progress is indeed a forward march, ho! Wagons west, destiny manifest. But modernism, even in its most po-mo strain, is no longer a destination fit for today's youth -- the "Re Decade," quoth Reynolds. Moreover, their overall journey, itself, has been irrevocably altered. According to Reynolds, "... instead of being pioneers and innovators, they've switched roles to become curators and archivists." Even more arresting, for both Simon and me: "The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde." C'est la vie, it seems, here in 2011.

To be fair, many a culture has had an unhealthy obsession with her antiques. Remember the Renaissance? (Or, since Reynolds is a London émigré to LA, the Victorian fascination for all things medieval?) "Decades usually have a retro twin: the seventies looked to the fifties; in the eighties you had multiple different versions of the sixties vying for attention; and then seventies music started to get rediscovered in the nineties," Simon does say. But the real crux of "retromania," at least as Reynolds proscribes here, is that no civilization in the history of humanity has been so obsessed with the still-warm relics of her own immediate past. Of course, "there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously," he contends. True, the Net makes us experts with one click of the mouse, but in turn, it also makes us jealous and contrite that we weren't there for the real-time unfurling. In other words, I can't help that I was born too late to see the original Gang of Four. But I sure as hell will catch what's left of them today. You, me and Simon -- we're all in this together. Complicit consumers, each has digital blood on his hands. From the outset, though, Reynolds portends, "... my gut feeling is that pop and the museum just don't go together." But because this is Simon Reynolds, he'll always be righter than me.

"But what happens when we run out of past?," Reynolds then questions. Culture, like coal, is non-renewable. Once the mountain top is blown off, a real inconvenient truth remains: we simply cannot continue to burn through the retrol at our present rate. Time after time, from Frank Sinatra to Cyndi Lauper, pop will repeat itself. Time and again, from R.E.M. to Pavement, such saturated fats of nostalgia - a "temporal" and "vicarious" malady now - will not go gentle into the belly politic. And in that sense, Reynolds has brilliantly diagnosed the problem. Furthermore, he does so non-invasively -- not worsening the symptoms he's tasked with examining. It's love in the time of a cholera, too, as Reynolds' toughly researched affection hurts him more than it hurts the affliction he's so obsessively scrutinizing. "This attachment on the part of young people to genres that have been around for decades mystifies me," he admits. And while he never explicitly admits the slippery slope I'm wont to take, I sense he's worried all the same. ("I come not to bury the 2000s but to appraise them," he confesses in his best, albeit oblique Mark Antony.) Likewise, if you care at all, even just a smidgen, about the future of music, art, fashion, film, television, sports, cuisine, cars, etc. ad inf., you would be, too. If I had but one wish for Simon Reynolds' latest tome, it's that it would prescribe a proper remedy. Given the "hyper-stasis" he coins - "the paradoxical combination of speed and standstill" endemic to our time - alas, we might be beyond saving, even for our own Simon Peter here.      

Staying Biblical, like Lot's wife fleeing Sodom, if we acknowledge history in the act of new creation, we are doomed to repeat at least some part of it. And insofar as progressive aesthetics is concerned, that fate is worse than the briniest pillar of sea salt. But as Reynolds deftly points out, there's infinitely more at stake than little ol' rock ‘n' roll. "The world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness." With so many dot-coms forced to heed Alan Kirby's digimodernism, "we are still waiting for the music-about-music bubble to burst." Ultimately, in spite of this boom-time overaccumulation, the "recombinant decade" has yet to produce any genre of music on par with its parent trinity -- rap, rave or grunge. And that, I'm afraid, is its greatest sin. In fact, history might hold that the present will be the first one remembered more for how its sounds were found, versus how those sounds actually sounded.

Back to Marcus, Ian Svenonius once had a 13-point program to destroy this very nation. At 500 pages, Reynolds' Retromania is a virtuosic dossier on how the entirety of civilized culture will self-destruct. Dystopias don't typically sell all that well, so whereas Simon Reynolds can't write it outright, I most certainly will: Stuck between the year we make contact and the year the Mayans have us going silent, we look back because we have no future. Antichrist...meet the archivist.