Book description
We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for
commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues
of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels,
tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of
past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe,
where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon
Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues
that we have indeed reached a tipping point and that although earlier
eras had their own obsessions with antiquity - the Renaissance with
its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's
invocations of medievalism - never has there been a society so
obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.
Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the
question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and
distinctiveness of our own?
Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey through
Rave Music and Dance Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, The
Sex Revolts: Gender Rebellions and Rock and Roll (co-written with Joy
Press), Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 and, most
recently, Bring The Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock.
