Review: Simon Reynolds, Retromania:

Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own

Past (2011)

Simon Reynolds,
Retromania
and the
Atemporality
of Contemporary
‘Pop’

James Parker
156
One book dominated music criticism in 2011. A
virtuoso work of both musical and cultural history, a
strangely personal memoir of a life dedicated to pop and
its more obscure fringes, an absorbing and incisive
polemic against certain forms of musicological
nostalgia, retro and pastiche, a sometimes deterministic
and curmudgeonly look at the tectonic changes
supposedly wrought by the ‘digital revolution’ on both
musical consumption and practice: Simon Reynolds’s
Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past
was all of these things and more. Artforum put it in its
top 10 books of the year and called it ‘the best book on
pop music written since the turn of the twenty-first
century’.1 Perhaps it is. But the fact that many of the
other main contenders were also written by Reynolds
means that this is probably not a question worth
dwelling on at length.
Simon Reynolds is almost certainly the most
important music critic writing today. He is a superb
historian, a prolific and incisive critic and an extremely
judicious theoretician. Only Greil Marcus and Simon
Frith could possibly claim to have contributed more
towards the sophistication of contemporary music
discourse, but neither has managed to keep their finger
on the pulse in quite the way Reynolds does. Since the
start of his career in the mid 1980s, he has written for
every major music publication on both sides of the
Atlantic and authored seven critically acclaimed books,
each of which has seemed exceptionally ‘timely’ on its
release. Retromania is no exception there, except that its
timeliness is far more overt. The book finds Reynolds as
self-appointed diagnostician of the Now: of
contemporariness itself. And he pulls no punches in the
delivery of his findings. Pop has lost its momentum, he
argues. The present has been infected by an obsession
with the past.
Fitting, then, that it’s with Reynolds’s own past that
I want to begin. A close reading of his early work reveals
a vision of pop and the function of music to which
Reynolds has remained committed for virtually the
entire duration of his career. Retromania turns out to be
Reynolds’s not-so-surprising response to pop’s recent
failure to live up to his unashamedly modernist
expectations.
1. THEN
In 1984, Simon Reynolds was on the dole. He had just
completed a degree in history at Oxford and needed
funds in order to dedicate himself properly to the work
of launching a new zine with some friends. The result
was Monitor. Today it would probably be called a
journal. The production values were high, the aesthetic
crisp and contemporary — ‘high quality paper stock,
stark typefaces, striking design’2 — and, in terms of
content, the authors certainly weren’t afraid to wear
Retromania and the Atemporality of Contemporary ‘Pop’
their learning on their sleaves. Monitor’s founding
principle was ‘no reviews, no interviews, just
thinkpieces’.3 The sixth and final issue, for instance,
published in the summer of 1986, was entitled ‘Pop:
Subversion and Surveillance’.4 Which is to say, Monitor
was fairly subversive itself at a time where the majority
of fanzines prided themselves on their belligerent anti-
intellectualism, on the one hand, and a kind of
‘egomaniacal self-celebration’ on the other.5
By this point, Reynolds had already been hired as a
staff-writer at an ailing Melody Maker. Together with
some of his old mates from Monitor who were hired
soon after, he played a key role in the magazine’s famed
renaissance between the end of the eighties and the early
nineties: an intellectual thorn in the once great NME’s
now rather Neanderthal, rockist side. Reynolds’s first
book Blissed Out was published in 1990.6 A collection of
his best pieces from Melody Maker, which he had now
left in order to follow his girlfriend (and fellow writer,
Joy Press) to the US, the book essentially makes an
argument for jouissance in Rock. At a time when most
rock criticism continued to ‘probe rock for its “spirit”’,
to work out what it was ‘saying’, to Reynolds it just
‘seemed more exciting to be swept up in its incoherence’.7
The sheer noisy ecstasies of My Bloody Valentine’s
guitars, for instance, ‘the “visual noise” of certain kinds
of flamboyance, brio, effervescence, élan’, the ‘geyser
gush of glossalalia’, Prince’s scream, the Pixies’s holler:
this was what rock at the vanguard was about for
Reynolds at the end of the 1980s.8
After Blissed Out came The Sex Revolts in 1995, an
engaging but now rather dated study of rock’s relations
to gender and rebellion that Reynolds co-authored with
Joy Press, now his wife.9 And then, three years later while
he was a senior-editor at Spin magazine, Energy Flash.10
Energy Flash is important for a few of reasons. First,
historically: because it traces with such rigour and
erudition a history of rave and rave culture, right from
the genre’s early days in Detroit, New York and Chicago
through to its ‘climactic budding in the motorway-side
paddocks of Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s’.11
MOJO called the book ‘exceptional’: ‘Reynolds has
tracked the unfolding sounds and rituals of “the (al)
chemical generation” so comprehensively’, it said, ‘that
he virtually obviates the need for any further literature
on the period’.12 Not only that, but with Energy Flash
Reynolds brought to the music itself a level of
sophistication, theoretical rigour and intelligence that
was conspicuously lacking in much of the global dance
press at the time. Kodwo Eshun, for instance, has called
dance criticism circa 1995 ‘meagre, miserly, mediocre’,
intent on maintaining rhythm as ‘an unwritable,
ineffable mystery.’13 Reynolds, by contrast, not only
wanted to explain rave, but to valorise it, to give it a
certain amount of ‘high-culture’ legitimacy at a time
where it was being systematically derided in some
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quarters as mindless drug and body music. For Reynolds,
‘electronic dance music dissolves the old dichotomy
between head and body, between “serious” music for
home-listening and “stupid” music for the dancefloor’.
There is a ‘kinaesthetic intelligence’ to it. ‘A good dancer
is “listening” with every sinew and tendon in her body …
The entire body becomes an ear.’14
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book,
however, is that it came from an erstwhile rock critic.
Sonically, rock and rave may not have much to do with
each other, but, as Reynolds explained in 2002, ‘in terms
of attitudes and values’ rock had a huge influence on it.
By the 1990s, electronica had ‘become the inheritor of
rock’s seriousness: its belief that music can change the
world (or at least an individual’s consciousness), rock
notions of “progression” or “subversion”, the conviction
that music needs to be more than entertainment’. And it
did this even as it was overtly challenging, or even
dismantling rockist conventions in relation to how
creativity works (electronica, for instance, was quick to
jettison rock’s cult of the musician as ‘auteur’), what
defines art, and ‘where precisely the meaning and power
of music is located’.15
This distinctly modernist vision of music’s power and
social import has always been shadowed in Reynolds’s
work by an anxiety about its failure, which, as we shall
see, reaches its peak in Retromania. Already, in a piece for
the very first issue of Monitor, way back in 1984, Reynolds
wondered: ‘What happens to movements when they cease
to move? Why do youth culture revolutionaries persist in
allegiance to styles and subcultures long after their
moment of peak impact?’16 Why would punk, for
instance, a genre that shone so brightly with the promise
of reinvention in the second half of the 1970s, devolve
into mere ‘style’, a series of standard gestures — of sound,
dress and attitude — rather than remaining committed to
the project of reinvention itself? Why persist with the
techniques of punk, when its spirit was so much more
interesting and important?
It was precisely a concern for this spirit — music’s
futurist or teleological mandate as it played out in the
wake of punk — that animated Reynolds’s next book, a
genealogy of so-called ‘post-punk’, published in 2005
and appropriately entitled Rip It Up and Start Again.17
Rip It Up and Start Again charts a very discrete
period of musical history: just seven years, from 1978 to
1984, a period of virtually unrivalled musical creativity
and perhaps even ‘progress’. Post-punk, for Reynolds –
The Fall, Joy Division, Public Image Ltd, Pere Ubu, Devo,
The Residents, Throbbing Gristle, The Slits, The Art of
Noise – was musically ‘way more interesting than what
happened in 1976-7 itself, when punk staged its back-to-
basics rock’n’roll revival’. Indeed, in terms of the ‘sheer
amount of great music created, the spirit of adventure
and idealism that infused it, and the way that the music
seemed inextricably connected to the political and social
DISCIPLINE N002 Autumn 2012
turbulence of the times,’ post-punk rivalled even ‘those
fabled years between 1963 and 1967 commonly known as
the “sixties”.’ ‘There was a similar mood-blend of
anticipation and anxiety, a mania for all things new and
futuristic coupled with fear of what the future had in
store.’18 ‘I’ve come pretty close since,’ Reynolds explains,
‘but I’ve never been quite as exhilarated as I was back
then.’19 And clearly for Reynolds exhilaration is the name
of the game. This, for Reynolds, is the essence of ‘pop’. In
Retromania, he calls it ‘future-rush’:20 an affective state,
the experience of being confronted with ‘the new’, the
necessary antidote to what Alain Badiou has called the
‘febrile sterility’ of contemporary culture.
Rip It Up And Start Again is probably still
Reynolds’s most influential book. When Leeds
University held a conference at the start of 2010 entitled
‘Post-Punk Performance: The Alternative 80s’, for
instance, author and critic Alex Ogg called it the
‘elephant in the room’, by far and away the conference’s
‘dominant text,’ a ‘near ubiquitous reference point’,
‘doctrinal’.21 This was a problem for Ogg not just because
it tainted proceedings with an unsettling degree of
uniformity, but because Reynolds’s book is so selective,
and specifically in favour of the period’s ‘more
progressive voices’, even if they were heard and
consumed as ‘punk’ at the time.22 In other words,
Reynolds stands accused of defining post-punk
according to his own specifically modernist
predilections, and in doing so of ‘unfairly diminishing
the parental culture’s diversity and vitality.’23
If Rip It Up has been both influential and
controversial, then, on its release in 2005 it was also
extremely timely. A swathe of new bands had recently
begun to revive post-punk’s sound and conventions.
Foreshadowing the entire tenor of Retromania, this was
the note on which the book finished. At the start of the
2000s the sounds being made by the likes of The
Rapture, Liars, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, !!!, Wolf
Eyes and Franz Ferdinand would have seemed strangely
familiar to anyone conversant with the music covered in
the book. Reynolds put it like this: ‘
Many of these groups are just great … and it’s both
thrilling and enjoyably disorienting to hear the
sounds of my youth resurrected … Yet the very
thing that seems most worth resurrecting from
post-punk is its commitment to change. This belief
was expressed both in the conviction that music
should keep moving forward and in the confidence
that music can transform the world, even if only
through altering one individual’s perceptions or
enlarging their sense of possibility.24
In other words, post-punk is not a sound, it’s an attitude.
Moreover, it’s an attitude that Reynolds has found in all
his favourite music right from the very start of a career:
158
a forward logic, if you like, a total commitment to and
investment in ‘the artistic imperative to be original’.25
It’s precisely this imperative that in Retromania
Reynolds finds so conspicuously lacking since the start
of the new millennium. Since then, he writes, the ‘pulse
of the NOW’ has begun to feel weaker with each passing
year.
In the 2000s the pop present became ever more
crowded out by the past, whether in the form of
archived memories of yesteryear or retro-rock
leeching off ancient styles. Instead of being about
itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous
decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity
of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling
away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era
with a distinct identity and feel.26
In other words, we live in a time in which The Strokes’s
debut Is This It? can be lauded by many as the great
album of the decade not just in spite of the fact but partly
because ‘everything about [it] seemed like it was lifted
from ’60s and ’70s garage rock.’27 We live in a time when a
throwback like Adele is not only the biggest selling
artists of the decade, but is roundly applauded for her
‘state-of-the art retro soul, with touches of Motown,
bossa nova and 1970s piano pop.’28 We live in a time
where the hottest new sound to grace the global pop-
consciousness in the last couple of years, what Mark
Fisher has called ‘euphoric R&B’, sounds breathtakingly
similar to the kind of Eurohouse being played in Ibiza as
recently as the 1990s.29
2. NOW
Strictly speaking, Retromania is about more than just
music. At its broadest, it is a sweeping and at times
polemical critique of contemporary popular culture in its
entirety: TV, film, fashion, even furniture. All of it,
Reynolds claims, has succumbed to the same retro-centric
‘malaise’: a case of out with the new, in with the old:
endless Hollywood remakes, the constant revivals of
‘classic’ TV shows, vintage aviators, retro haircuts, old-
school typewriters, Eames chairs. In its most general
form, the diagnosis is this: ‘there has never been a society
in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of
its own immediate past’.30 The argument in this respect is
not always subtle or convincing. Reynolds’s penchant for
fashion-bashing especially will rile anyone who takes
more than a passing interest in that particular area. ‘We
talk of artistic movements or political movements,’ he
writes, ‘because they are building towards something, and
in the process they definitively jettison earlier stages of
development or outmoded ideas. But in fashion,
everything démodé becomes à la mode again, sooner or
later … In fashion, everything is transient except the
Retromania and the Atemporality of Contemporary ‘Pop’
sweet music of the cash register.’31 Indeed, Reynolds’s
failure to strictly delimit his field of inquiry to pop music,
or indeed music, means his argument is often drawn to
those aspects of culture that reinforce his argument,
rather than being an exhaustive analysis of a specific field
of practice. Elsewhere, however, the book’s non- or not-
exclusively musicological passages are amongst its most
fascinating and least controversial parts.
The histories Reynolds offers of certain previous
retro-cultures — from the British trad-jazz revival of the
1940s and 50s through Northern Soul to the strange
cultish underground of hardcore Record Collecting and
Japan’s peculiar and longstanding fetishisation of retro
and pastiche — are all particularly good. Similarly,
Reynolds’s critique of the ‘museumification of rock’ is
pretty irrefutable. A museum, as Reynolds puts it, is
fundamentally ‘opposed to the vital energies of pop and
rock … Pop is about the momentary thrill; it can’t be a
permanent exhibit’.32 It is, by its very nature fleeting,
transient. And therefore fundamentally oriented towards
the new and the next. Indeed, Reynolds is quick to note
with Theodor Adorno the proximity — both
etymological and actual — between the museum and the
mausoleum. The British Music Experience, it seems, is a
perfect example of a place where music goes to die: an
enormous rock museum based out of the once-
Millennium Dome since 2009, full of the worst kinds of
ephemera, musty cliché and the totally unironic
iconisation of iconoclasm itself: life-sized cardboard cut-
outs of the Jonny Rotten.
Reynolds is scathing too about the birth and
apparent flourishing of so-called ‘prestige acts’ and their
never-ending comeback tours: The Stooges, The Police
and The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Blur, Dinosaur Jr,
Rage Against the Machine. Not even the likes of
Throbbing Gristle or the Sex Pistols have proven immune
to the lurid lustre of the heritage circuit dollar: their
original fans now ‘nostalgic for chaos’ at the same time as
being both conveniently moneyed and comfortable in the
suburbs.33
Combine this phenomenon with the big-money,
mega-box-set re-release, complete with every last
alternate take of that little known B-side, and what you
get is a music industry whose economic structure is
increasingly back-ended. You don’t need to make it big
the first time round so long as you make it big enough to
warrant a reunion tour and a deluxe vinyl reissue of your
debut album. In this sense, as Reynolds seems to suggest
but never quite makes explicit, we can think of retro as
being inherently capitalistic. Even as the market
demands the constant creation of new products —
bigger, better, faster — it will do what it can to maximise
the profitability of the old: even if that means investing
less in the new and innovative.
This is a key point because Reynolds’s problem is
not simply an overabundance of older acts in the
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contemporary market, it’s the insidious effect that the
mainstreaming of retro culture in general has had on the
music being made today. I’ve already mentioned The
Strokes, Adele and so-called ‘euphoric R&B’, but we
could equally add to the mix The White Stripes, Jet, The
Libertines, Amy Winehouse, Ladyhawke and Lady Gaga
(despite her more interesting visual aesthetic). None of
these acts are doing anything remotely innovative in
sonic terms, and yet it passes. We don’t just accept it —
by and large we applaud it. Partly, no doubt, because
they are simply tweaking and rehearsing the sounds that
an ageing consumer market grew up with, but partly
also because the major players in the music industry
these days are increasingly conservative. Again, if you
share even the least bit of Reynolds’s modernist
sensibility, you’ll most likely to be sympathetic to his
critique in this respect.
More interesting and controversial is the way he
takes aim at less mainstream trends as well. The real
problem for Reynolds isn’t so much the fact that your
Dad just bought tickets to see Phil Collins, it’s the fact
that the music you and your hipster friends are blogging
about could easily have been made by him (Washed Out,
Gayngs, certain tracks by Bon Iver). As Reynolds puts it,
where retro truly reigns as the dominant sensibility
and creative paradigm is in hipsterland, pop’s
equivalent to highbrow. The very people who you
would once have expected to produce (as artists) or
champion (as consumers) the non-traditional and
the groundbreaking — that’s the group who are
most addicted to the past. In demographic terms,
it’s the exact same cutting-edge class, but instead of
being pioneers and innovators, they’ve switched
roles to become curators and archivists. The avant-
garde is now an arrière-garde.34
Consider Ariel Pink, for instance, a soldier for retro if
ever there was one. When Pink uses the term
‘retrolicious’ to describe his sound — woven, as
Reynolds explains, ‘out of blurry echoes of halcyon radio
pop from the sixties and seventies’ — Reynolds is both
surprised and concerned that he is able to do so ‘without
a trace of embarrassment’.35 After all, ‘what exactly is
this music’s contribution? Is it laying down anything
that future equivalents of Ariel Pink could rework?’36 It’s
not that Reynolds thinks there’s anything wrong with
nostalgia per se. ‘Nostalgia is, after all, one of the great
pop emotions.’37 The problem is largely one of scale. On
the one hand, the fact that Pink is just the tip of the
iceberg: a vast glut of ‘hypnagogic’ and ‘chillwave’ drivel
that somehow manages to pass for the avant-garde these
days. And on the other hand, the fact that so many of the
very best artists of our time — Burial, Oneohtrix Point
Never, Flying Lotus, The Focus Group, Mordant Music,
Maria Minerva, John Maus, James Ferraro, William
DISCIPLINE N002 Autumn 2012
Basinski — are, like Pink, ‘making music whose primary
emotion is towards other music, earlier music’.38
This is a subtly different critique to the one in
relation to The White Stripes et al. or the neo-post-
punkers at the end of Rip It Up. This time the point is
not so much that the artists in question sound like
earlier bands but that their music is in dialogue with
earlier music. This is music, in other words, which is
overtly genealogical in orientation, or at least extremely
historically aware. If you wouldn’t necessarily mistake it
for the music of an earlier period, it’s certainly evocative
of it. Often presented under a patina of decay and fuzz,
the effect of this music is uncanny, suggestive of a past
degraded but not quite dead. Hence the term
‘hauntology’, an appropriation from Jacques Derrida in
Spectres of Marx, which has been widely taken up since
Reynolds himself first proposed it in a blog post back at
the start 2006.39 Hauntology, Reynolds explains, ‘is all
about memory’s power (to linger, pop up unbidden, prey
on your mind) and memory’s fragility (destined to
become distorted, to fade, then finally disappear).’40
Either way, its contemporaneity consists precisely in its
orientation towards the past: a past, of course, which
was itself heavily invested in the future. That is, part of
what hauntology is about is a nostalgia for modernism
itself. Julian House of The Focus Group calls it ‘looking
back to looking forwards’.41
It’s here that Reynolds’s argument in Retromania is
both at its most ambivalent and its most contentious.
Ambivalent because Reynolds clearly loves so much of
the music which troubles him most. Indeed, he has been
a veritable champion of much of it on his blog, in the
pages of The Wire and elsewhere. Contentious because
Reynolds treads dangerously close to a wholesale
dismissal of the techniques of the postmodernism that
he equates it with: reference, quotation, irony, pastiche.
His rejection of ‘mash-up’ in particular is virtually
categorical. And because he chooses never to elaborate a
fully fledged aesthetic project of his own, he makes it too
easy in places for an unsympathetic reader to dismiss
him wholesale as an ageing curmudgeon, raining on the
kids’ parade. Part of the problem in this respect is a
result of the book’s style.
Unlike Reynolds’s previous work, Retromania is an
extremely personal book. In one sense, that is part of
what makes it such a compelling read. Reynolds has a
real flair for anecdote and a decade of prolific blogging
has clearly served him well in this respect too: there is a
casualness to his prose which enables him to hold many
of his more theoretically sophisticated points nicely. But
so much is dealt with at this level, so much is
personalised, that it can be hard to know which points
are intended to be generalised and when. This is
particularly true in relation to Reynolds’s technophobia.
As someone who embraced the mp3 over a decade ago
now for its ease and portability, for instance, what am I
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meant to make of a critique offered by someone who
claims to have avoided the iPod altogether as an ‘emblem
of the poverty of abundance’? For whom ‘the idea of
carrying your collection with you wherever you went
didn’t seem at all appealing,’ but ‘freakish’?42
It’s a shame, too, that where Reynolds is normally so
conscientious and sophisticated theoretically, when it
comes to questions of technology he is content to resort
to shady pop-psychology and the dubious authority of
texts such as Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the
Internet is Doing to Our Brains,43 Steven Levy’s The
Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce,
Culture and Coolness44 and Dylan Jones’ iPod, Therefore
I Am.45 Why Reynolds is happy to evoke Freud and
Derrida for the purposes of his discussion of the archive,
for instance, but the one-time editor of GQ for his
consideration of the iPod and digiculture is a mystery.
It’s certainly not as if there’s a lack of superior texts to
choose from: Manuel Castells, Lev Manovich and
Jonathan Sterne being just a few of the more obvious
examples.
This is an important criticism because Reynolds
wants to frame so much of the blame for the
contemporary predicament in specifically mediological
terms. The basic claim is a well-known one: that the
biggest innovation in music in the last decade has not
been sonic at all, but technical — not The Beatles, but
Napster. For Reynolds, we are still waiting for the
acoustic equivalent to the so-called ‘digital revolution’
mainly because that revolution has made so much of the
music of the past so readily available to us, no more than
the click of a button away. In a revealing companion
piece to Retromania published in The Wire around the
time of the book’s release, Reynolds put it like this. The
analogue and digital systems, he argues, ‘created
particular kinds of affects, modes of identification and
convergences of social energy.’ Under the analogue
regime — because it was based around the physical
movement of information-containing objects: records,
tapes and magazines — time was tilted forward. It was
structured around ‘delay, anticipation and the Event’.46
With digiculture, by contrast, ‘time is lateral, recursive,
spongiform, riddled with wormholes’. It is marked by ‘a
paradoxical combination of instantaneity and
permanence, speed and stasis’.47 Digiculture’s
‘a-temporality’ levels the playing field between the old
and the new and in this sense, for Reynolds, it is
inherently conservative.
While Reynolds does admittedly stop short of a full-
blown determinism — YouTube, he says, isn’t just a
website, or even a technology, ‘but more a whole field of
cultural practice’48 — he certainly grants the shift from
analogue to digital a large amount of aesthetic agency.
So LA based ‘wonky’ artist Flying Lotus, for instance, is
a symptomatically ‘webby’ musician. His 2010 opus
Cosmogramma is a ‘sprawling, post-Web 2.0
Retromania and the Atemporality of Contemporary ‘Pop’
cacophony…like hurtling through the digital darkness
of Spotify with everything blaring at once’. Flying Lotus’s
music, Reynolds says, ‘seems to contain its own
hyperlinks’.49 When, on Before Today, Ariel Pink offered
up an instrumental cover of an Ethiopian pop song from
the eighties that he’d discovered while surfing YouTube,
this was an aesthetic gesture that would have been
virtually impossible less than a decade earlier. What
hope does the genuinely new have when reviving some
‘exotic’ genre from the depths of the net will do just as
well for anyone who wasn’t there — either temporally or
geographically — the first time round?
Not only that but the web puts so much music and
so much writing about it at our fingertips that musicians
and critics alike are increasingly informed about it too.
We’re all PhDJ’s now, Academicritics. In another piece in
The Wire on retro-oriented ‘chill rave’ artist Laurel Halo,
Reynolds is amazed at just how self-aware she seems to
be about it all: her references to ‘memory asymptotes’
and the ‘vague-ening of memory caused by our brains
starting to “mimic our patterns of information retrieval
and consumption on the internet – to the point where…
we move towards this eternal Present”’.50 ‘Superfuckin’
Intellectual Dance Music’, Reynolds calls it. And again
he’s intriguingly ambivalent. At the same time as he
professes to being a real fan of Halo, the concern that
we’ve somehow managed to rear a whole generation of
artists and critics who are more well-informed than they
are innovative looms palpably large. ‘That’s what strikes
me about the new breed’, he writes elsewhere: ‘they think
like critics. They navigate the history of music using a
kind of combinatorial logic (Goth + dub = LA Vampires/
Zola Jesus). They frame projects with over-arching
concepts or clearly designated reference points…Like
certain critics, they’re genremaniacs.’51 The incursion of
contemporary musicians into the historical field makes
the music critic/historian’s task, along with his tools of
genre and influence, inherently more difficult and
circular.
3. TOMORROW
It boils down to this. Whatever gripes I might have
about the precise form of Reynolds’s argument in
Retromania, and particularly in relation to his claims
about digiculture’s inherent retro-ism, the book is
nevertheless basically persuasive. One of the editors of
this journal put it to me that Retromania was
‘incremental’. That’s exactly right, I think. Although
there’s plenty to take issue with in the specifics of
Reynolds’s critique, the overall force of it does at least
feel right: it builds and builds and builds and soon
enough it’s hard not to hear retromania everywhere.
When I try to think of the genuine sonic innovations
that have emerged in the last few years, or at least those
that are definitively not tainted by the shadow of the
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past — dubstep’s now ubiquitous ‘wobble’, the increasing
prevalence and sophistication of so-called ‘vocal science’
(from the T-Painification of pop to J-Dilla and DJ
Screw’s massive influence on the treatment of vocal
samples across so many genres), the staggering,
stuttering, lopsided de-quantization of so much
electronica and hip-hop — they all feel desperately
small: so little music right now feels momentous,
nothing seems to threaten to simply change the terms of
the game.
One exception to that rule perhaps has been
Chicago’s ‘footwork’, which really took off globally in
2011 thanks in part to the very same technologies which
Reynolds blames for the spread of retromania. The first
time I saw footage of footwork on YouTube, complete
with soundtrack from the likes of DJ Rashad, DJ
Diamond, Traxman and RP Boo, it induced precisely the
sort of ‘future shock’ that Reynolds claims to have felt so
rarely since the heyday of rave. Both as a form of dance
and as a musical genre, footwork is confronting. To
listen to it can be extremely uncomfortable, its velocity
and peculiar rhythmic dislocation really difficult to get a
handle on. Part of this clearly has something to do with
the fact that it was developed in a kind of splendid
isolation, by a scene, a community, an underground,
before unleashing itself on the ears of the world: just like
in the good old days of rave and post-punk. With
footwork’s emphasis on the street, the dancefloor and
the ‘Real’, it’d be easy to think of it as an ‘analogue’
movement: in other words, proof perfect of Reynolds’s
argument. Except that footwork doesn’t just owe its
increasing popularity to digiculture, it is itself a product
of it too. Amongst its practitioners, footwork is made,
performed and distributed digitally. Not only that but,
like Flying Lotus, it has a distinctly ‘webby’, digital feel
to it too. Footwork is a digimusic in the sense that it is
totally concerned with compression: low-bit rates as
much as microscopic beats: as many of those frenetic
digisnare hits as a bar can possibly take.
The point isn’t to herald Footwork as some sort of
savior of the Now. It’s to suggest that for anyone who
shares Reynolds’s modernist/futurist sensibility, there’s
still hope. Even in a period of ‘radical atemporality’,
even if YouTube and the dreaded iPod are here to stay,
futuremusics are still possible: and not just in spite of
digiculture, moreover, but because of it. In other words,
what Reynolds calls ‘hyper-stasis’ is not inevitable, and
‘xenomania’ — the term Reynolds uses to describe the
increasing exoticisation of the foreign52 — is not
retromania’s only alternative.
Indeed, Reynolds ends his book on just such a
hopeful note: ‘I still believe the future is out there,’53 he
writes. The fact that he fails to offer a prospectus to that
end may well rile some readers, but that is simply not
the level at which the book operates. The best way to
understand Retromania, it seems to me, is not
DISCIPLINE N002 Autumn 2012
necessarily in terms of the arguments it advances at all,
but rather in terms of what it does. Retromania is a
provocation. It deals in what Mark Fisher calls
‘negativity’. The term is intended to be less pessimistic
than it sounds. ‘Negativity’, for Fisher, is a productive
spur: discontent as a call to arms. ‘One of the drivers of
popular music in Britain,’ Fisher argued a lecture in
Berlin recently ‘was negativity, a sense of I can’t get no
satisfaction, No Future etcetera, that has sort of been
replaced by — ironically at a time when there really is no
future in lots of ways — by this kind of cheery, anodyne
positivity.’ And one of the things that hauntology does,
for Fisher, is ‘give voice to that sense of disquiet’.54
Rather than simply represent that negativity, however,
Reynolds and Fisher would have us respond to it. This is
the difference too between the kind of negative
politicism expressed during the recent London riots and
those camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral and across the
world in the name of the Occupy movement. Negativity
is obviously not an end in itself, but sometimes it simply
has to come first.
Ultimately, what Retromania does is to force us —
musicians, critics, listeners — to think more carefully
about what is at stake in retro, to think twice before we
endorse or applaud it, to remember that sometimes, in
some contexts, retro is simply not good enough, that we
can and sometimes should do better. This is the seed of
‘negativity’ that Retromania plants. And if the book
deals in broad brush strokes, that’s because its canvas is
necessarily large. Yes, we could talk about the tyranny of
generalization if we wanted to: we could point out that
no sounds are without a history, that retromania is to
some extent a necessary and permanent condition, that
we have, in a certain manner of speaking, always been
postmodern and that in this sense there is nothing
intrinsically novel about the contemporary
predicament. And every step of the way Reynolds would
agree with us. Despite the rampant and sometimes
dewy-eyed modernism with which he has pursued
virtually his entire career, he is certainly no fool. Every
step of the way, in other words, his provocation would
still stand. Yes, I take your point, he would say, but still
… can we really not do better?
Whatever Retromania’s faults, Reynolds deserves
real credit for his ambition alone. Considering the sheer
number of music critics around these days, the
sophistication of the discourse is not always high. No
doubt part of the problem in this respect is structural.
Compared with arts writing, for instance, contemporary
music criticism yields desperately few opportunities for
paid work, and certainly not enough to sustain more
than a handful of ‘careers’ without supplementation.
And because historically contemporary music criticism
also has fewer ties with the Academy, that
supplementation has also traditionally been harder to
come by. With the rise and rise of the PhDJ, things are
162
changing quickly in this respect. But still, there are
exceptionally few critics with either the ability or the
capacity to offer anything on quite the same scale as
Reynolds does here. It is true, of course, that in this
respect music criticism is subject to a certain retromanic
tendency itself: the same old voices from the heyday of
Rolling Stone, Melody Maker and NME taking up the
majority of the space in the world’s broadsheets,
publishing new collections of old work, and new
editions of old collections. Nevertheless, there is a real
risk involved in any attempt to take the measure of the
zeitgeist, a risk which few if any of Reynolds’s critics
have exposed themselves to. And of the few writers who
have also attempted to speak in the name of the Now,
none has done it anywhere near as successfully as
Reynolds. While Dorian Lynskey’s voluminous history
of the protest song 33 Revolutions a Minute, for
instance, is more than accomplished as a history, when
Lynskey starts to lament the relative paucity of such
songs in the present, it comes off like a eulogy for the
sixties in a way that Reynolds’s work never does. And
where Adam Harper’s book Infinite Music: Imagining
the Next Millenium of Human Music-Making attempts
to set out precisely the kind of aesthetic program that
Retromania so-conspicuously lacks, the fact that it
makes for such a dull read in parts is testament perhaps
to Reynolds’s wisdom in refusing to go there himself. In
other words, for all its faults, Retromania is totally
peerless: an important provocation at a moment when a
certain amount of provocation was probably necessary.
And if it raises a few rankles, so much the better. You
can be certain that’s part of what it was intended to do.
Retromania and the Atemporality of Contemporary ‘Pop’
1 Tosh Berman, Artforum, December 2011.
2 Simon Reynolds, ‘How the fanzine refused to
die’, The Guardian, 2 February 2009, http://
www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/02/
fanzine-simon-reynolds-blog; accessed 20
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3 Reynolds, 2009.
4 Simon Reynolds interviewed by Andrew
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of-the-zeit/; accessed 20 February 2012.
5 Simon Reynolds, ‘Fanzines’ in Melody Maker,
January, 1997; accessed online at http://reyn-
oldsretro.blogspot.com.au/2009/02/fanzines-
melody-maker-january-24th-1987.html, 23
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6 Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of
Rock, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990.
7 Reynolds, 1990, p. 12.
8 Reynolds, 1990, p. 13.
9 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts:
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bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
10 Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey
Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Lon-
don: Picador, 1998.
11 Andrew Mueller, ‘Energy Flash: A Journey
Through Rave Music and Dance Culture by Si-
mon Reynolds’, New Humanist, Vol. 123, Issue
2, March/April 2008, http://newhumanist.org.
uk/1746/energy-flash-a-journey-through-rave-
music-and-dance-culture-by-simon-reynolds;
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12 Simon Reynolds, ‘Energy Flash Info and Hype’,
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cessed 20 February 2012.
13 Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun,
00[-007].
14 Simon Reynolds, ‘Prologue’ in Javier Blanquez
and Omar Morera (eds.), Loops: Una Historia
De La Musica Electronica, Historia Electronica,
Milan: Monadori, 2002.
15 Reynolds, 2002.
16 Simon Reynolds, ‘Fanzines: The Lost Moment’,
Monitor, Issue 1, 1984, http://reynoldsretro.
blogspot.com/search?q=monitor; accessed 20
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17 Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again:
Post-Punk 1978-1984, London: Faber, 2005.
18 Reynolds, 2005, p. xiv.
19 Reynolds, 2005, p. xiv.
20 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s
Addition To Its Own Past, London: Faber and
Faber, 2011, p. 428.
21 Alex Ogg, ‘Beyond Rip It Up: Towards a New
Definition of Post Punk?’, The Quietus, 1 Octo-
ber 2009, http://thequietus.com/articles/02854-
looking-beyond-simon-reynolds-rip-it-up-to-
wards-a-new-definition-of-post-punk; accessed
20 February 2012.
22 Ogg, 2009.
23 Ogg, 2009.
24 Reynolds, 2005, p. 527.
25 Reynolds, 2011, p. 176.
26 Reynolds, 2011, pp. x-xi.
27 Simon Reynolds, Blissblog, 13 October 2011,
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es-from-tribute-to-strokess.html; accessed 20
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163
 28 Rolling Stone, ‘50 Best Albums of 2011: No 1,
Adele, “21”’, http://www.rollingstone.com/
music/lists/50-best-albums-of-2011-20111207/
adele-21-19691231#ixzz1id6PItPi; accessed 20
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29 Mark Fisher, ‘Review: Rustie, Glass Swords’,
The Wire, Issue 332, October 2011, p. 51.
30 Reynolds, 2011, p. xiii.
31 Reynolds, 2011, p. 192.
32 Reynolds, 2011, p. 3.
33 Reynolds, 2011, p. 10.
34 Reynolds, 2011, p. xx.
35 Reynolds, 2011, p. xxii.
36 Reynolds, 2011, p. 424.
37 Reynolds, 2011, p. xxiii.
38 Reynolds, 2011, p. xxi.
39 Simon Reynolds, Blissblog, 11 January 2006,
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2006/01/mike-
powell-evocative-and-thought.html; accessed
20 February 2012.
40 Reynolds, 2011, p. 335.
41 Reynolds, 2011, p. 336.
42 Reynolds, 2011, p. 115.
43 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet
is Doing to Our Brains, New York: WW Norton
& Co., 2010.
44 Steven Levy, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod
Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness, New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
45 Dylan Jones, iPod, Therefore I Am, London:
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46 Simon Reynolds, ‘Excess All Areas’, The Wire,
Issue 328, June 2011, p. 32.
47 Reynolds, June 2011, p. 32.
48 Reynolds, 2011, p. 59.
49 Reynolds, 2011, p. 77.
50 Simon Reynolds, ‘Review: Laurel Halo, Hour
Logic’, The Wire, Issue 330, August 2011, p. 53.
51 Simon Reynolds, ‘New Age Outlaws’, The Wire,
Issue 327, May 2011, p. 41.
52 Simon Reynolds, ‘Xenomania: Nothing Is
Foreign in an Internet Age’, MTV Iggy, 29 No-
vember 2011, http://www.mtviggy.com/articles/
xenomania-nothing-is-foreign-in-an-internet-
age/; accessed 20 February 2012.
53 Reynolds, 2011, p. 428.
54 Mark Fisher, interview with Olaf Karnick,
May 2010, quoted in ‘Mark Fisher’, Lux Aeterna:
The Transcendence of Music, Berghain Berlin
10.–11.03.2011, http://www.aeternal-music.
de/17-1-Mark-Fisher.html; accessed 20 Febru-
ary 2011.

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