Below I've posted my review in The Weekend Australian of Simon Reynolds' new book, Retromania - Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past:
TO make notes for this review I retire to the cafe on the corner of my street that serves as an alternative office.
Here the under-30 hipster baristas serenade the customers with the retro sounds of
Bill Haley and the Comets,
Frank Sinatra,
the Rolling Stones and
Canned Heat; recent artists are notable by their absence.
Returning to my desk, I download a new compilation devoted to 1960s TV pop sensation
the Monkees, while playing over my speakers a new compilation of obscure Nigerian bands from the 70s, followed by an album by
Frank Fairfield, a young man acclaimed because his banjo and fiddle playing sounds like something you'd hear on an Appalachians cabin stoop circa 1948.
Later I continue the long-term task of transferring my CD collection -- mostly old stuff -- to hard disc while the iTunes shuffle setting keeps surprising me with musical juxtapositions often decades and even centuries apart. In the evening I'll watch a new movie,
Drive, whose soundtrack is sewn together not from current pop hits or now-sounding orchestral writing but from pastiches of 80s-style electropop and a kind of chilly electronica rooted in the 70s.
That these time-jumping experiences are normal in 2011 is something that concerns British-born, US-based critic
Simon Reynolds, the most stimulating contemporary popular music critic in the English language for the past 25 years. Reynolds exhibits the usual fan's obsessiveness with wide-ranging interests and relentless curiosity, but the key to his consistent readability is a keenly analytical mind that recognises the importance of sometimes coolly stepping back from the fashion and the passion to make sense of what's driving it all.
His latest book sprang from the dawning feeling that after several decades of his immersion in waves of innovation -- from post-punk through hip-hop to rave and beyond -- the 2000s seemed to have ground to a halt.
Where earlier decades, the 60s in particular, were underpinned by a sense of forward momentum, pop culture now, Reynolds thinks, is set in permanent shuffle mode: suffocating in endless reissues, band reformations, boxed sets and endless free illegal downloads. We are caught up in an over-abundance of choice and a self-awareness that has bled all the obsessiveness and belief in the immediate present that made the the 20th century so vital....
"Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present's own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel," he writes. More playfully, Reynolds suggests that "this is the way that pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the
Pixies or
Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university".
Much of this is spot-on, as my opening paragraph makes clear. Today our consumption of recorded music is marked not only by its relatively long and rich history but also the technological means to bring that history into our ears at the click of a mouse. Not that this is new; pop has been eating itself (to paraphrase the name of a British band from the 80s and 90s) for a long while. For evidence that anxiety about missing the excitement of the 60s and 70s youthquakes predates even the world wide web, see the 1990 film
Pump up the Volume, in which
Christian Slater's pirate DJ complains about his generation's born-too-late dilemma.
So have we really come to the end of musical development; will there be no more new scenes such as rave culture or hip-hop, no new equivalent of punk or psychedelia? Reynolds's exhaustively researched, sometimes maddening and immensely stimulating book leans towards an end-of-history hypothesis that sounds persuasive until you consider the music that doesn't fit its arguments.
While the tiredness and second-hand nature of much contemporary music goes without saying, there's plenty that does not fit this description. Reynolds appears deaf, for example, to the vital Brooklyn scene (
Animal Collective,
Grizzly Bear,
Dirty Projectors et al) that has turned reverence for
Brian Wilson, among others, into a thrillingly urban and strikingly urbane new set of sounds. Has the writer, at the age of 48, become jaded?
The book's saving grace is that Reynolds is clearly conflicted in reaching his dour prognosis. His concluding chapter underestimates the way all former musical sub-genres rested on an often flagrant worship of the past (think of the
Woody Guthrie-fixated
Bob Dylan or the late 60s blues-rock boom). That's odd, given the rest of the book goes over this ground in obsessive detail.
Some of the most rewarding sections concern retro-based phenomena such as Britain's trad-jazzers of the 40s and 50s and its revivalist northern soul movement of the 70s (devoted to upbeat soul obscurities and popular in the north of England only). That this contradicts his sour conclusions does not seem to worry him, but it makes the book a highly rewarding read.
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own PastBy Simon Reynolds
Faber & Faber, 458pp, $35
Image: Brooklyn's Animal Collective
