Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011

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?

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 07/19/2011
Pages: 496
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.69w x 0.89d
ISBN: 9780865479944


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/30/2011
Booklist 06/01/2011 pg. 18
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2011
Entertainment Weekly 07/22/2011 pg. 77
New York Times Book Review 08/14/2011 pg. 15
Shelf Awareness 07/19/2011

About the Author

Simon Reynolds is a music critic whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Spin, Rolling Stone, and Artforum. He is the author of five previous books, including Rip It Up and Start Again.