There is no doubt that pop music is the area where...

There is no doubt that pop music is the area where retromania really runs rampant. There is something peculiar, even eerie, about pop’s vulnerability to its own history, the way the past accumulates behind it and hampers it, both as an actual sonic presence (on oldies radio, as reissues, through nostalgia tours and now via YouTube) and as an overpowering influence.

Simon Reynolds, arguing that we’re plundering our pop culture past. He continues:

The deeper you venture into the underground, the more music involves pilfering from the past. This is one of the central mysteries that propelled me through the writing of Retromania: how come the very kind of people who would have once been in the vanguard of creating new music (bohemian early adopter types) have switched roles to become antiquarians and curators? In the underground, creativity has become recreativity. The techniques involved are salvage and citation; the sensibility mixes hyper-referential irony with reverent nostalgia.

06/06/11 at 6:32pm