Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

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 cultural-ecological 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?

CONTENIDO:

Introduction: The 'Re' Decade/ The Retroscape
Prologue: Don't Look Back: Nostalgia and Retro
Part One: 'Now'
1. Pop will repeat itself: Museums, reunions, rock docs, Re-enactments
2. Total recall: Music and memory in the time of Youtube
3. Lost in the shuffle: Record collecting and the twilight of music as an object
4. Good Citations: The rise of the rock curator
5. Turning japanese: The empire of retro and the hipster international
Part Two: 'Then'
6. Strange changes: Fashion, retro and vintage
7. turn back time: Revival cults and time-warp tribes
8. no future: Punk's reactionary roots and retro aftermath
9. Rock on (and on) (and on): The never-ending fifties revival
Part Three: 'Tomorrow'
10. Ghosts of futures past: Sampling, hauntology and mash-ups
11. Out of space: Nostalgia for giant steps and final frontiers
- The retroscape (Slight return)
12. The shock of the old: Past, present and future in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index