I'm about half way through this, and two main things stand out so far. One is how there is finally a book-length take from a major publishing house on the types of conversations music lovers have been having on blogs/message boards and face to face with increasing frequency over the past decade. It's somewhat peculiar reading sentences I swear I've read, heard, said or at least thought to myself before. Not accusing Reynolds of plagiarism or even laziness, just surprised it took so long for this book to come into existence. Maybe Gaga's mainstream success was the tipping point that demonstrated just how permeating (and profitable) retro fetishism has become?
The second thing that stands out is also not that original, but it's a discussion that doesn't happen in music circles enough. Reynolds' points out that this obsession with reappropriating or outright ripping off the past is not unique to pop music, and in fact pop music is late to the game compared to other artforms and even Western culture at large. He begins the book discussing archive-mania, how academic and governmental agencies have become obsessed with documenting and preserving every last scrap of information, and how digital media has accelerated that impulse. Later he notes the '80s art world went through the kind of interest in the past and lack of concern for originality that pop music has been going through the last decade or so.
Interesting topics and an interesting book, but I'm not sure Reynolds is the guy who should have written it. He's obviously knowledgeable and scholarly, but he seems to rely too much on accepted knowledge and conventional wisdom. He assumes a lot about "listeners" and makes sweeping generalizations, things that are hard to avoid when taking on a topic this large, maybe, but he does it to excess. And like most music writers of today, he seems enamored of/suspicious of the elusive, hard-to-define hipster, which he at least goes to the trouble of positioning in the upper middle class (he is English, after all), which seems rather limiting. And his editor really should have caught him using the term "ultra-hip" three times in three pages, especially when he referred to Matador Records as such. I may accept an argument for Matador as hip, but ultra-hip? Not even in the '90s.
Unfair maybe to critique a book when only halfway through, but maybe the best thing it has going for it is its very topic, which stirs up all sorts of ideas and opinions, whether you agree with Reynolds or not. It's a quick read, but I'm making myself slow down to stay with it a while longer. ( )

The running timelines at the beginning made it hard to get started—but after that, it was smooth sailing: an interesting and insightful look at US and British pop from the mid-twentieth century on.

Plus, it helped me think through high school reunions, of all things: https://walkingthewire.substack.com/p/proving-nothing-to-the-past

Ich habe gefühlt noch nie so lange an einem Buch herumgekaut, wie an diesem. Nach über einem Monat habe ich das Namedrop-Dauertrommelfeuer des Hrn. Reynolds nun überstanden.
Wirklich gefallen und angesprochen hat mich dabei eigentlich nur der Teil 3 "Morgen" und da insbesondere Kapitel 10 "Die Geister der vergangenen Zukunft - Sampling, Hauntology und Mashups". In diesem Kapitel arbeitet er recht gut den Begriff "Hauntology" auf und geht auf aktuelle Strömungen wie Chillwave ein.
Besonders genervt hat das Herumgeprahle mit Wissen über alle Spielarten des Folk, einem Genre, mit dem ich null anfangen kann. Dieses Genre dürfte ihm beim Niederschreiben des Buches gerade gefallen haben und es taucht ständig an verschiedensten Stellen des Buches als Namedropping von Superunbekannten Weird-Folk Artists auf.
Alles in allem war das Buch für mich größtenteils ein riesengroßes BLA und es blieb wenig, bis gar nichts hängen. Eine Herausforderung ist gegeben, wenn man das Buch als Anleitung zur Schnitzeljagd sieht, aber letztendlich ist mir das auch zu blöd und bzgl. Hauntology blieb hängen: Boards of Canada ist superwichtig für dieses Genre und das war es auch schon wieder und aus. ( )

4.5 - Reread of this. Reynolds goes a little too much into music nerddom at times and parts are slightly dated now, but this is still an excellent piece of academic yet highly accessible work. ( )

This book would alienate readers less if it didn't set out its goal immediately - it mostly is a history, rather than the dismissal of contemporary music that it kind of sets itself up as. Reynolds has always been honest about what do or doesn't excite him about music while he does outstanding musical analysis in the context of social history; this one is no different. ( )

The central argument got lost in the pervading sense that the past was, in fact, better than current culture. ( )

I'm not 100% convinced by Reynolds' arguments. He makes the case that pop has been eating itself perfectly well, but he didn't convince me it's bad. This was, however, a great history lesson, and I discovered some new-to-me music, so it gets back one of the stars it would have otherwise lost 8) ( )

I imagine that if you are a fan of the rock music of some (or all) of the last six decades then there will be plenty for you in this book. Reynolds has clearly devoured huge chunks of the music and displays an encyclopaedic knowledge of the background of those who made it. His central theme, that rock music has been constantly casting back to the primal rock and roll of the 50s. The theory has some merit, but it often seems that he is happier riffing (or perhaps even rehashing) on the bits of rock history that he knows a lot about (particularly late 70s and early 80s). Your enthusiasm for the book will come down to whether this kind of meandering is interesting or whether (like me), you felt if the book was cut in half, it would have been a tighter and compelling read. ( )

Superb. Thoughtful and wears its learning lightly ( )

Reynolds shows in much detail how pop music, from its intense initial stages in the late 50ies and especially the 60ies, successively moves away from its innovative and original character and turns into variaton, self-citation and mere repitition. It's intriguing how he works out references, were you wouldn't have suspected them, like when he demonstrates hidden citations in punk.
If it weren't for lengthy passages spreading out detail over detail from a vast archivarian's knowledge this book would be a perfect read.
It still contains really great passages, expecially where it goes beyond musical styles talk, embedding music in a broader context of culture, society and technology.
The culminating chapter is on the lost conception of future, which not only does affect music, but pop culture and even western culture as a whole.

Of course the book doesn't provide an alternative, other than that of vague optimism. It is still an intriguing piece of cultural analysis.

Personally i liked the book as - not being a audio crack - it stirred up my curiosity, making me actively listen to music again which I hadn't done for quite a long time. ( )

I found this recommended on Warren Ellis' blog; I think I'm glad I read it, though it left me with a temporary doom-and-gloom feeling about popular music. Reynolds's contentends that (practically) all pop music since the 60s is a desperate rehash of the decades that come before it - that artists have been mulching rock'n'roll down into a fine paste of irony and derivation. Yeah, kinda.

Reynolds is most interesting when he gets off on a sidebar (and I don't mean the actual sidebars in the text, which I found distracting. I don't think the book's structure was so tight that they couldn't have been incorporated into the main text). I enjoyed his discussions of record collecting and the Northern Soul scene, for example.

On the other hand, the interesting passages were hard to find among the sheer accumulation of detail. Page after mournful page describing how each 'new' thing was simply a reworking of an older style. I agree with him in many cases, but I don't share his feeling of gloom. So what if punk was inspired by earlier, stripped-down rock'n'roll? It still produced some great music. Sometimes he gets so wrapped up in proving that a new style was a reinvention of an earlier sound that the music's quality doesn't count for anything.

I would also have appreciated more discussion of rap, hip-hop and R&B; while it's only natural that Reynolds should gravitate towards his preferred genres, and while he does discuss soul, funk, and (to a lesser extent) reggae in detail, I thought we drifted into white middle-class ground for the '90s and '00s.

While I agree that the inventiveness of white western pop music has stalled in the last few decades (including the time when I was in high school), I think this book was too long for Reynolds' ideas. Eventually, the piling-up of detail made me feel rebellious about his conclusions. While I also wish that pop music would get a real Next Big Thing, a dose of inventiveness and strange, I started to feel that Reynolds was prizing the new over the good.

Fittingly, there's a lot in "Retromania" that will strike many readers as pretty familiar. Reynolds engages in some righteous boomer-hating, asking if we'll ever be free of sixties-era musicians and their needless, endless nostalgia tours. He also goes neo-Luddite for a while, bitching about newer technologies' reduced fidelity and disregard for the album format. Though Reynolds presents his arguments well, you can get this stuff elsewhere. "Retromania" really gets interesting – perhaps even vital – when Reynolds posits that artifacts and music of the past function as a species of cultural capital and examines how rock scenes look to both their own pasts and society's collective future for inspiration. In doing so, he neatly turns some well-worn rock narratives on their heads. He's not afraid of the obscure, either, examining the role that vintage clothing and record shops played in the development of both the punk and hippie subcultures and delving deep into the history of Northern Soul, a scene I'd only heard about in passing. The problem – as Reynolds sees it – is that the technological and stylistic obsolescence that drove this economy is, thanks to YouTube, MP3s and torrents, now itself a thing of the past. Are new things, or even fresh takes on old things, a possibility in a world where the entirety of the past is available to all of us?

Reynolds doesn't really have an answer, of course, and I think he might have done well to include a clearer definition of what constitutes "newness." It doesn't seem that Reynolds is himself a musician, so much of his discussion, like so much rock criticism, seems to be a discussion of musical style rather than content. His arguments seem to chase each other around the text, too, perhaps even contradicting each other, but that is part of the book's appeal: the past, as Reynolds sees it, can either trap musicians in a permanent yesterday or provide inspiration for forward-thinking projects. In the last chapters of the book, he examines how some retrophiliac acts like Broadcast and Boards of Canada have used the twentieth century's own ideas of the future to create hauntingly personal music that takes advantage of modern technology's ability to preserve large chunks of the recent past more or less indiscriminately. He also seems to argue that pop culture, and perhaps people in general, have lost faith in the future: while we get excited about techno gadgetry, most of us no longer believe that the future will be better, or substantially different, than the present. Still, when he examines the astonishing quantity of bravely experimental electronic music that followed the launching of Sputnik in the late fifties and the nineties' explosively creative, ruthlessly futuristic rave scene, he seems to conclude that a link exists between creativity and the belief that our tomorrows will be better than our yesterdays. I can't say that I always found the author's case entirely convincing – indeed, I found myself arguing with him throughout the book – but he's provided some genuinely fresh ideas about pop music's relationship to its past and future that people who take their music collections as seriously as their mortgage payments won't want to miss. Recommended. ( )