Retromania

I'm reading Retromania, by Simon Reynolds (Isbn Edizioni, Milan, 2011, 506 pages, €26.90). I haven't finished it yet (I'm about halfway through), so this is a partial review. However, so far it seems to me to be a decidedly well-written and well-argued book, rich in facts, almost too much so, and this is its only limitation: it could have saved us some of these 433 (506 with bibliography and indexes) pages. But I'm not complaining: if only we had more critics with this depth of analysis and documentation. Michele Piumini's translation is also excellent.

Here Reynolds examines the remake trend that has gripped the pop/rock scene since the new millennium, symbolized by the opening, in April 2000, of the Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum at the Smithsonian Institution.

This issue, in fact, is one of the things that strikes me most in current music, rarely in a positive sense, more often negatively. As the introduction states,

Pop once bubbled with vital energy — the 2000s, however, seem hopelessly sick of the past

Why don't we know how to be original anymore? What will happen when we run out of past to draw on? Will we be able to free ourselves from nostalgia and produce something new?

But I realize that the negative meaning I attribute to retromania may also depend on the fact that I lived through that past and that vital energy, so I can't easily accept the remakes proposed by current music, which often end up seeming like poor copies, devoid of the strength and meaning of the original.

In any case, among the questions the author asks, the first and last seem the most pressing to me. The second, in my opinion, is useless: the past, in fact, is never exhausted. As trends teach, there's always something to redo or a different way to redo it.

We are, in fact, witnessing a celebration of the past that affects every sector, without exception: from the most common, clothing, to furniture, television, cinema, toys and video games, food, and even retro porn (such as vintage hairy porn, porn before the advent of total body hair removal).

In an attempt to explain, Reynolds' text opens with an impressive and slightly distressing retrology: a list of dates and facts that covers the decade 2000-2009 and ranges from celebratory museums like the aforementioned Memphis Rock'n'Soul Museum or Paul Allen's Experience Music Project, to reunions (more than 30, maybe 40 in 10 years: in many cases a funereal parade of elderly and battered individuals, often still able to play well, but who they act squalidly like twenty-year-olds), and it reaches the concerts of tribute bands and the re-releases/remakes of records and even historical events (such as the mass crossing of Abbey Road on August 8, 2009, 40 years after the Beatles for the cover of the album of the same name).

Regarding pop music, the central hypothesis is that one of the driving forces behind this trend is the accumulation made possible by the internet. Everything is now available online, and there's room for everything. Photographs, songs, videos, television clips, books, old magazines, graphics, and so on. With the advent of multifunctional cell phones, everyone carries a video camera, a still camera, and a tape recorder. Documenting the present and posting it online is very easy, but the present quickly becomes the past. Furthermore, people now post online not only current events, but also their memories and generally what they love or consider important: memorabilia in the form of still images, videos, and audio are saturating the available space online, a space that, however, continues to expand thanks to the declining cost of mass storage.

The sharing of all this material, then, is imposed by those who offer the space. Entities like YouTube earn their money solely through advertising, and advertising is attracted solely by the quantity of views. Therefore, the material available must be shared, and it must be plentiful (neither the quality nor the content are of great importance; what matters is that it generates views).

At this point, according to Reynolds,

The sheer volume of the accumulated musical past began to exert a kind of gravitational pull.
[…]
Musicians who came of age during this period grew up in a climate characterized by an overwhelming and unprecedented degree of accessibility to the past.

Furthermore, I might add, for anagraphic reasons, they have not lived the past and are therefore fascinated by it.

Consequently,

The need for movement, for getting somewhere, could be satisfied just as easily (indeed, more easily) by turning to this immense past and not by looking forward.

In fact, a comparison between current availability and that of Reynolds or myself (I was born in '54, he was born in '63) is untenable. In our time, the past disappeared. Albums quickly went out of print, and if you didn't buy them in the early years, they were easily lost. Furthermore, file sharing in the old days was limited to audio cassettes, and access to records depended on your financial resources.

Today, in the ocean of the internet, you can fish for almost anything for just the cost of your connection (which is also necessary for other things), so it's normal to go listen to it, just as it's easy to wallow in it. The current state of creativity is made difficult precisely by the fact that, unlike before the internet, the past never disappears. For example, I was 12 or 13 when I started listening to rock seriously. I first discovered the bands of my time (e.g., the Beatles, the Stones, and the others), and only a few years later did I listen to the roots of these bands: blues and rock 'n' roll. Nowadays, however, everything is available at the same time.

Similarly, I saw records and bands getting old, while new genres and bands were emerging. That is, I had a linear perception of time, oriented from the past to the future. Currently, however, movement has been replaced by accumulation: we no longer move from a past, with things that age and disappear, to a future that offers novelties, but other things are added that stratify into an immense deposit that tends to cancel time and produce what Reynolds calls temporal stalemate, the final effect of which is to block any tendency towards progress (understood as simple movement, without a value judgment) and produce a continuous reshuffling of what exists or has existed.

Here is the blog dedicated to the book, in Italian, with extensive excerpts.
Other blogs by the author, in English

Back