Everything new is old again. Channel surf through Hawaii
Five-O, Doctor Who, Beverly Hills 90210,
and, coming soon, Dallas, and you feel out-of-time in
primetime. Turn on the radio and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” the
monster song of 2011, deludes you into thinking that you are
listening to an oldies station playing a '60s girl-group. For $10,
déjà-vu cinema plays The Rise of Planet of the
Apes, Conan the Barbarian, Arthur, and other
flicks you thought you saw several decades ago.
We’ve seen these movies before (and watched those shows and sung
that song, too). Simon Reynolds has written a whole book about the
phenomenon,
Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.
It’s about time. “Instead of being the threshold to the future, the
first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the
‘Re’ Decade,” Reynolds writes, as in “revivals”
“reissues,” “remakes,” etc. We are a present
stuck in the past that leaves little for the future.
Old Media merely broadcasts our lameness. New Media fosters it.
YouTube, iPods, DVDs, and Hulu bring the then face-to-face with the
now. “We’ve become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to
store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of
cultural data,” Reynolds relays. “Not only has there never before
been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its
immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is
able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.”
Technology intended to usher us into tomorrow instead keeps us
mired in yesterday.
Since Reynolds covers the music scene, Retromania
focuses upon sonic folkways. The author introduces us to
taxonomaniac record collectors who don’t listen to their stockpile;
studio-whiz samplers who use their cutting edge technology to
resurrect the aural past; and rock museum curators who attempt to
put awopbopaloobopalopbamboom in a gallery. Those whose
avocations call them to keep rock music alive instead advertise its
death. They miss the point.
Reynolds is decidedly retro about his explorations of
retromania. Fascinating is Retromania’s discussion of the
surreal sixties success of fifties revivalists Sha Na Na.
Established in the wake of the Columbia student riots to unite
warring campus factions with rock n roll, Sha Na Na soon found
itself performing at Woodstock at the behest of Jimi Hendrix. If
not for the cinematic documentation of the faux-fifties greasers
entertaining thousands of hippies, nobody would have believed that
it had happened. Their fifteen minutes of fame, based as it was on
the fifteen minutes of teen idols long since forgotten, probably
should have never happened. But it became more like fifteen years.
They opened for John Lennon. They appeared in the film
Grease. They invaded living rooms every weekend from 1977
until 1981 through their campy syndicated television show. The
celebrants enjoyed a career far longer than the celebrated. Could
there be more compelling evidence supporting the book’s thesis that
we are crazy for the past?
Reynolds is crazy about people crazy about obscure no-hit
wonders, subcultures of subcultures, and has-been never-was beens.
In a book ostensibly about popular culture, so much discussed never
sniffed popular (perhaps it surpassed good). The English ex-pat
writes that the Flaming Groovies’ Shake Some Action “was a
massive record in the Bomp! milieu.” The album peaked at
#142 on Billboard; the fanzine’s milieu was about as populous as a
small rock club. He discusses Belbury Poly, whose ambient music
samples old public information films and stock scores to television
shows. Its genre, hauntology, is so obscure that it doesn’t even
have a Wikipedia entry. He points to the popularity of Oi! bands
and psychobilly music in Japan, noting that a nation of 130 million
“can support a huge array of subcultures, retro and contemporary,
that exist completely outside the pop mainstream.” Why does a book
whose subtitle advertises its interest as pop culture obsess over
what escapes nearly everyone’s notice? Books written by critics
needn’t be written for critics. Trivia that might have been
charming as an aside becomes a bore when it conquers whole
chapters. Listening to unfamiliar music can be exhilarating;
reading about it is penance for the sins of past lives.
The illustrations buttressing the point are flawed. The point
certainly isn’t. The bestselling album of the last decade was a
collection of Beatles number-one songs, after all. What recordings
from the 1920s even charted during the 1960s? Nine of the top ten
grossing movies of 2011 are either sequels or based on dated
characters such as “Captain America.” A remake-happy Hollywood and
backward-looking music industry strip-mining the glory days
devastates the cultural landscape for posterity. “The surge decades
of pop history were characterised by the emergence of new
subcultures and an overall sense of forward propulsion,”
Retromania asserts. “What was lacking in the 2000s was
movements and movement. One manifestation of the sense of
deceleration: 2010 didn’t feel that different from 2009, or even
2004. Whereas in the past, the difference between years — between
1967 and 1968, or 1978 and 1979, or 1991 and 1992 — felt immense.”
A mash-up decade obsessed with the identities of dead decades
etched no unique identity of its own.
Could the dearth of pop-culture creativity be a symptom of a
larger disease? Reynolds sees parallels between Western
civilization’s decline and Western cultural rot. “The world economy
was brought down by derivatives and bad debt; music has been
depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness,” he
notes. Reynolds dubs retromania a “recession of creativity.” We
have become a take-much, leave-little civilization. In business,
politics, and culture, stagnation abounds.
Do our unhealthy borrowing habits extend to entertainment? Is
cultural innovation a victim of technological innovation? Might
moribund production affect art as well as business? A line
referencing the 1960s within a U2 song from the '80s dubbed a
sequel to a John Lennon song from the 1970s best explains
retromania: “You glorify the past when the future dries up.”
