Retromania
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"If you google for "Italian soundtracks" and "Polish movie posters" you get one hit: Retromania by Simon Reynolds. This was not done in retrospect."--Sholem Stein "A fan of the inadvertent avant-gardeness of 'bad' or 'clunky' design (as with library-music sleeves or Polish movie posters), House intentionally achieves similar effects through 'bad looping looped samples that change their start and end points'. lt's an approach that resists and subverts the CGI-style seamlessness that today's sequencing-and-editing music software at once 2000s, pioneered by the likes of Charalambides and MV & EE, and popularised by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom."--Retromania (2011) by Simon Reynolds "The Shibuya-kei taste map shows a pronounced bias towards the dainty, the sprightly, the blithe, the borderline anodyne: French sixties pop, Italian soundtracks, bossa nova and especially 'sunshine pop' (Roger Nichols & the Small Circle of Friends, a sub-Fifth Dimension outfit, were a particular touchstone). The Postcard label and the tradition of Scottish indie pop it spawned was hugely admired, and there was a penchant for what the Japanese dubbed 'funk-a-latina': Haircut 100 (Flipper's Guitar actually wrote a song called 'Haircut wo' ), Blue Rondo a la Turk, Matt Bianco. The composite of all these innocuous and already distinctly ersatz sources was a cosmopolitan hybrid that didn't draw on any indigenous Japanese influences."--Retromania (2011) by Simon Reynolds |
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Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2011) is a book on retro culture by Simon Reynolds.
Blurb
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?
