Retromania

I've done a (rather edited) review of Simon Reynolds's new book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past for Oxonian Review (click here to see it). It's well worth reading for its interesting and detailed history of pop revivals, which almost constitutes a history of pop music itself (ironically, it sort of undermines Reynolds's own ethics of pop's essence as being necessarily 'in the moment'). But Retromania is also valuable for the thoughts provoked by its deeply tendentious assessment of how pop music is created and consumed today. This is not to necessarily agree with the book, whose subjectivity and lack of balance is not concealed or mitigated (but then nor is it announced), making that a bit difficult. Actually I think I didn't manage to get across in the review how much you can't really argue, on a general level, with the fact that things have been getting a bit more retro lately. But then diagnosing what feels like everyone who is creating popular culture with retromania, or being 'glutted', is a generalising label that becomes a damaging assumption, affecting how (and whether) we listen to new music - reductio ad retromania. (Or Retro Man Ear, if you want to kill the vogue for pomo puns in music criticism forever.) In new music, some information will always be old and repeated while some information will always be new, in various ratios.

But like Reynolds I'm more into modernism than retroism, and arguing that there's always some degree of novelty and difference in a new musical offering that can in principle be detected (or, on the other side of the same coin, that past music can't be exactly repeated) is a bit not seeing the wood for the trees. One of the ideas that sometimes goes with twentieth-century modernist attitudes to art and music is that it doesn't mean anything, that it doesn't reference anything 'outside itself'. This is intriguingly reflected in Reynolds's odd-when-you-think-about-it statement that 'Instead of being about itself, the noughties has been about every other previous decade, happening again all at once.' You wonder how a decade can be 'about itself' - presumably by not making any significant reference to any other decades at all. But isn't this a tall order? Where do you draw the lines? Which repetitions of prior musical information count as references and which don't? Can we say absolutely? I don't think so, but then I'm a monstrous relativist and I'm coming for everything you hold dear.

I've never bought the meaninglessness theory of modernist art. Art always comes to reference something for us simply because we experience it in the context of our past experience of what you could call a 'language' of music built on some degree of repeated (i.e. familiar) information. Some artworks have more references and make them more clearly than others by repeating more of the familiar than differing it into something new, but there's always something that has come from the past, even if it's just a timbre. Is the use of a electric guitar in 2011 a reference to pop's past? You could say that, though you might also say it depends on what the guitar's playing. What about synths? Is every sounding of a basic sawtooth waveform on a synthesiser an eighties revival? If there are exceptions, where and why are they? And does it count as a revival if you never heard the original, or are you somehow being cheated in this case? Not only is every musical offering different, but every listener is different too.

On his blog The Fantastic Hope, Alex Niven has written a response to my review, mentioning 'the whiggish view of history', i.e. the optimistic historiography that progress towards utopia is always being made, whether at faster or slower speeds. It's a naive grand narrative. But it's not inherently an optimistic thinking error to observe that musical novelty and its flipside, musical repetition, are always there and always relative and changing in proportion. This is the more even-handed and imaginative attitude to musical development that would have made the anger over lack of novelty in Retromania so much more powerful and meaningful. Instead, it's haunted slightly by some of the clichés of the reactionary music critic, such as how the music of the present is insufficiently respectful, or is in a number of senses excessive, and how the music of one's formative years happened to have things right. We've heard all of that before.

But I'm glad of the 'call to arms' that it's possible to read into Retromania. To borrow a distinction from Mark Fisher, hopefully music-makers and listeners will respond not to its capacity for pessimism, but to its negativity. Even if we're perhaps yet to discover what will count as significantly new, negativity without pessimism demands a new world.