By Simon Reynolds
Barnes & Noble link
(I dedicate the Doctor Who references in the beginning paragraph to my Amy Pond-cosplaying, Dalek-hugging little sister. Keep on shining with your Sonic Screwdriver.)
I shall never doubt the contents of the introduction ever again. When I cracked open Reynolds’ latest offering in music criticism/history, the introduction led me to believe that all the arguments were going to be a big load of “cool story, bro” and at worst, pathetic. By the fourth chapter, I was thunderstruck. Yep, seems like society jumped into a TARDIS and went back without warning the rest of us. And we left the Good Doctor behind.
Retromania is exactly as it says on the cover page: an examination on our recent obsession with everything behind us. That’s the thing though; this is far from a new feeling. As Reynolds pointed out, there have been trends in ancient times where the Renaissance was very interested in Greek and Roman ideas (to cite one example).
But what’s with the mash-ups, bands sounding like resurrections of legendary acts, and fascination with all that is sepia-toned and filled with the gentle cracklings of a record? Well, it is more than just “wow, the [decade of your choice] was awesome! Let’s relive it!” In fact, it takes Reynolds quite a while to get to the answer (warning: this passage contains inappropriate usages of common mental illness terms):
Retro is a byproduct of what happens when popular creativity is enmeshed with the market. The result is a cultural economy organised around bipolar rhythms of surge and slowdown, mania and nostalgia. As we saw with fashion and the pivotal years of 1965/6, the hunger for the new creates an insatiable appetite for change that can’t be sustained indefinitely, for aesthetic innovation can never be a steady flow and is subject to stalling, deadlock or exhaustion of ideas.
-from page 197
In other words, retromania was and is inevitable. It was something I also wondered about as I was reading the book. When is it okay to go into a certain music genre or fashion style, even when it is deep from the past? And innovation rises as a rebelling against old ideas (see: how and why punk music was formed). How does that old saying go? "Necessity is the mother of invention"? Well yeah, but do enough research, you realize punk is a more political version of rock music. The sound is attention-grabbing and the lyrics are normally observations of the human condition. You could also argue that... for rap in its earlier form! So yeah, I had a little difficulty with the argument. The spirit of it is right-on, but the explanation needed a little more work.
The chapter “Pop Will Repeat Itself” was one of the first eye-openers. Discussing about the concept of classic bands reunited for “that one last go-round” or making new albums, Reynolds states this fact (one that most music fans will admit to thinking about not applying into practice):
When fans buy new albums by reformed favourites of their youth, at heart they’re not really interested in what the band might have to say now, or where the band members’ separate musical journeys have taken them in subsequent decades; they want the band to create ‘new’ songs in their vintage style.
-from page 40
This is probably why Talking Heads haven’t reunited. David Byrne must’ve been completely aware of this and didn’t want to resurrect what was something that ended (that doesn’t change the jerk-ass way he did end it). There is no way that serious fan had never felt this way about a reunited band ever. So yeah, it was a big splash of ice-cold water. Such an unfair expectation for fans to have. God forbid the artists grow and learn! We want Hotel California 2.0! Screw innovation! Could it be, in a strange way, us fans and critics are half-responsible for retromania?
The big one, at least for me, was the chapter "Lost in the Shuffle". The chapter details how the iPod, while generally an interesting invention, has changed how we collected and listened to music. He details his massive collection of vinyl and eventual obsession with MP3s:
You inevitably begin to think about whether there's actually enough life ahead of you to listen to all the stuff you like one more time, let alone make new discoveries.
-from page 87
He goes on to point out the continuous need for wanting, a collection that is never supposed to end. How we browse blogs for endless supplies of free music. Quoting friends that point out that "...if one really listened to one's records, one would have a lot less of them" (from page 111).
It all amounts to a sad conclusion: the scarcity of music has been changed forever. Instead of taking the time to pick and choose which is worth our time, with the Internet and illegal downloading, we see the new environment as a free-for-all buffet and indulge to the point of "damn, when am I going to listen to all of this?" Atop that, with the ability to skip through songs (unlike with a turntable), we just get to the good parts and never take the time and (patience!) to listen and enjoy. And screw the shuffle option, we just skip to the songs we want to instead of indulging on the "what if". And I know this, since I am guilty of this very thing.
Reynolds surprised me by citing the (rightfully) jeremiad The Shallows by Nicholas Carr in the chapter "Total Recall". It basically adds up to the same idea Shallows had: technology and the Internet are changing how we think and our capacity to. Atop that, we can revisit the past by watching old films and listen/download to old songs. So while the Internet is basically a DeLorean, it is coming at a price. Since we can skim and skip, why bother "suffering" through the whole thing? Yeah, at the expense of our attention spans, that's what.
While I didn’t agree with all the points (see the following post), Retromania comes highly recommended. It is a book that will make you observe the world and everything that is going on right now. It engages the reader into critical thinking, wondering if their favorite new bands are no more than Beatles/Who clones. Maybe not. But it does warrant a question. Well, how did we get here? And how do we get out?*
Easy: we need to be looking to the future. Know that while the great past stuff is, well great, the possibility of invention and innovation is so damn exciting. It has happened before, so why not again? Let's get enthused, so says Reynolds:
This sensation [future-rush] is electric but impersonal; it's about new forms, not new faces; it's a much purer, harder hit. It's the same scary-euphoric rush that the best science fiction gives: the vertigo of limitlessness.
I still believe the future is out there.
-from page 428
And hey, better than lamenting about how nothing is good anymore and doing zilch about it, right?
~
COPYRIGHT NOTE: all bold quotes are from the novel and were written by the author himself. Those words are not my own.
*While I was trying to be clever and sorta-quote "Once In A Lifetime", I just realized I also sorta-quoted "Illume" by Fleetwood Mac.
And hey! Nicholas Carr wrote a review on Retromania too! Give it a read.
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