RETROMANIA: Pop Culture's Addition to Its Own Past (a Review)
Orig. Pub. 10-23-14
Music critic Simon Reynolds is perhaps best-known for his coining of the term, "post-rock." He is also regarded for his incorporation of critical theory in his analysis of music. His 2011 book,
Retromania was my first encounter with his writing.
Quote:
"I recently read Simon Reynolds’ Retromania and it was so spot-on as far as our current attitude to music and its history. For my money he’s one of the most intelligent music writers in the last two decades"
-- DJ Food
|
Retromania turned out to be much more than a critical examination of popular culture’s fascination with its past. It was a revealing study of my own approach to culture, trends, styles, and music. And I’m certain that I wasn’t alone in this discovery. Like most readers who made the personal decision to read 500 pages of cultural analysis by a music critic, it demonstrates the emerging and growing demographic of
cultural curators.
Quote:
|
Brian Eno noticed the rise of the curator and grasped its implications way ahead of the pack. In 1991, reviewing a book on hypertext for Artforum, he proclaimed: Curatorship is arguably the big new job of our times: it is the task of re-evaluating, filtering, digesting, and connecting together. In an age saturated with new artifacts and information, it is perhaps the curator, the connection maker, who is the new storyteller, the meta-author.'
|
The new century is rich with metadata and globally-accessible archives of content from all cultures and eras. Youtube alone adds 100 hours of new video content every minute, and the emergence of music streaming services have only further-accelerated the accessibility of media, old and new alike. This raises perhaps one of the biggest questions of our era: can culture survive in conditions of limitlessness?
Chapter 4: The Rise of the Rock Curator was the first glimpse into my own rationale as a cultural custodian. It begins with the New Musical Express’ weekly column in the early 1980s -
”Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer.” Several rock groups of the decade presented their music with a kind of invisible reading-and-movie-watching list attached, conveyed through literary references within their lyrics of images depicted on their album jackets. (Sgt. Peppers is perhaps the best-known example of this execution.)
Reynolds writes that
“being a Throbbing Gristle or Coil fan was like enrolling in a university course of cultural extremism, the music virtually coming with footnotes and a ‘Further Reading’ section attached.”
As the decade progressed, this curatorial baton was passed from the artists to their fan-base, who began, (whether consciously or unconsciously) to compile not just their favorite artist’s records, but the films, novels, and art which inspired their recordings.
The book goes on to explore the nature of collector-culture in the digital age and touches upon both the decisively retro action of record collecting and the inherent merits and dysfunctions associated with the activity, as well as the hoarding habits of media collection with respect to digital music.
But it was in a chapter on the 60s’ embrace of revivalism that I found the greatest revelation regarding my own bizarre fascination with music, art, and culture of the past. Reynolds writes -
Quote:
|
Remember the Pop Boutique store in central London with its slogan 'Don't follow fashion. Buy something that's already out of date'? Just as vintage can have an undercurrent of recalcitrance towards fashion, similarly it is possible for rock nostalgia to contain dissident potential. If Time has become annexed by capitalism's cynical cycles of product shifting, one way to resist that is to reject temporality altogether. The revivalist does this by fixating on one era and saying: 'Here I make my stand.' By fixing identity to the absolute and abiding supremacy of one sound and one style, the revivalist says, ' This is me.'
|
Retromania is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read. In a simple skimming of the book's index, I found what was effectively a list of the contents of my own studio. The book examines:
Pierre Henry’s Le voile d'Orphée I et II
Varese's Poème électronique
Perrey & Kingsley’s The In Sound From Way Out!
Bell Telephone Laboratories
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop
The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
Raymond Scott’s Manhattan Research Inc
The City of Tomorrow (1924)
Blade Runner
The Philips Prospective 21e Siècle label
The 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition
1958 World’s Fair in Brussels
Metropolis
Amazing Stories
Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970
Disney’s Tomorrowland
Einstürzende Neubauten
The Winstons’ Amen Break
Negativland
Public Image Ltd.
The Black Dog
Stereolab
Plunderphonics
2 Many DJs
24 Hour Party People
William Basinski
Steinski
Pop Will Eat Itself
Throbbing Gristle
Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
iPod Therefore I Am
Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children
The Avalanches’ Since I Left You
Fifties Revivalism
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Hauntology Exhibition at the Berkley Art Museum
The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld
The KLF / Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
DJ Shadow’s monumental Endtroducing LP
The glo-fi / chillwave / hypnagogic pop scene
and much, much more!