Does our obsession with retro music stop us from moving forward?
Born in London in 1963, Simon Reynolds is a high profile music journalist and writer who likes to explore musical genres from a sociological perspective.
His latest book is Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. His previous works include The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’roll (1995), Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (1999), and Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 (2005).
While Reynolds was happy to devote his time to a study of ‘retro’ — the phenomenon whereby fashions in music and dress constantly re-cycle what has gone before — he admits that he finds it slightly lame.
“It comes from my own history as a listener — growing up during the post-punk era, and then in the ’90s being heavily involved in rave culture, when music was constantly changing and innovation was the generally held ideal,” he says. “So those eras have created a benchmark for me of what I think pop culture should be. And not just those periods alone, but things like hip hop in the ’80s and much of the ’90s, things like Timbaland and the future-R&B revolution from the late ’90s, and even in the last decade, things like grime and elements within dubstep — they have maintained my belief in innovation, futurism, a music scene that keeps moving and mutating. That’s my big buzz.
“But equally, when I listen to music made before when I first got into it seriously circa 1978, the stuff I most admire is ’60s psychedelia, ’70s Krautrock, dub reggae, the arty end of glam like Roxy Music, electric jazz of the Miles Davis kind... all about pushing the envelope, exploration, strange hybrids. At the same time, I obviously enjoy quite a bit of retro-oriented music that’s heavily inspired by the past and plays games with history. But I tend to believe deep down that these are lesser pleasures.”
Whether retro provokes this reaction among the majority of listeners is uncertain.
“I think a lot of them think not only that this is normality, but that it has always been like this,” Reynolds says. “People who disagree with the book have said bands have always recycled. Or that even originality and innovation are myths. The point of Retromania is to de-familiarise the musical present, to show that retro is not the norm historically, but is an accumulating cultural syndrome that has built up over the decades until the current predicament.”
Perhaps retro is a consequence of changes in how music is listened to. Music is now endlessly available.
“There’s nothing wrong with listening to old music, or even being influenced by it, but I think it is more productive to use the past as a springboard to go somewhere new,” he says.
Certainly, it could be argued that downloading has depreciated music’s value and it is debatable whether it can regain its original significance for people.
“I think the problem with the downloading culture is that it has de-commodified music, which sounds very anti-capitalistic and, hooray, we’re kicking the corporations in the groin,” he says. “But it hasn’t returned music to any kind of sacred or communally ritual function that it might have had before it was commodified as recordings that you bought and used at home privately. It’s the worst of both worlds: value-less, virtually abject in its sheer over-abundance, something to treat very casually, like water from your tap.”
Does Reynolds believe there is music coming that will shock us, or should we settle for recycled entertainment?
“I hear a lot of things every year that are really cool and interesting, and quite a few that are genuinely new and startling,” Reynolds says. “However, they tend to be singular occurrences — artists as opposed to genres, and sometimes just particular tracks within a record or oeuvre — and these artists are also nearly all very marginal in the scheme of things, they operate a long way from the mainstream. There’s no shortage of talent out there, genius levels have not gone down... the problem is the process by which these occurrences gather momentum and become movements, pop cultural events, rifts in history. That used to work during the analogue era — what people call the monoculture — but the nature of digital culture, with its fragmentation and overproduction, seems to prevent things on the same level as punk or hip hop or rave from occurring.”
* Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past is published by Faber & Faber (paperback £10.99)
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