Retromania
Subtitle: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011
Language: eng
Number of pages: 458
ISBN-13: 9780865479944
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 culturalecological 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?
Table of contents: title: Introduction: The 'Re' Decade / The Retroscape
pagenum: ix; title: Prologue: Don't Look Back: Nostalgia and Retro
pagenum: xxv; label: Part One
title: 'Now'; label: 1
title: Pop Will Repeat Itself: Museums, Reunions, Rock Docs, Re-enactments
pagenum: 3; label: 2
title: Total Recall: Music and Memory in the Time of YouTube
pagenum: 55; label: 3
title: Lost in the Shuffle: Record Collecting and the Twilight of Music as an Object
pagenum: 86; label: 4
title: Good Citations: The Rise of the Rock Curator
pagenum: 129; label: 5
title: Turning Japanese: The Empire of Retro and the Hipster International
pagenum: 162; label: Part Two
title: 'Then'; label: 6
title: Strange Changes: Fashion, Retro and Vintage
pagenum: 183; label: 7
title: Turn Back Time: Revival Cults and Time-Warp Tribes
pagenum: 202; label: 8
title: No Future: Punk's Reactionary Roots and Retro Aftermath
pagenum: 240; label: 9
title: Rock On (and On) (and On): The Never-Ending Fifties Revival
pagenum: 276; label: Part Three
title: 'Tomorrow'; label: 10
title: Ghosts of Futures Past: Sampling, Hauntology and Mash-Ups
pagenum: 311; label: 11
title: Out of Space: Nostalgia for Giant Steps and Final Frontiers
pagenum: 362; title: The Retroscape (Slight Return)
pagenum: 399; label: 12
title: The Shock of the Old: Past, Present and Future in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century
pagenum: 403; title: Acknowledgements
pagenum: 429; title: Bibliography
pagenum: 431; title: Index
pagenum: 441