Daphne Carr, Carl Wilson and Ann Powers on "Retromania" →
More roundtables! This one’s really good.
Daphne and Carl demolish a book that I’ve been hesitant to read. (Will probably read it someday, I guess. When there aren’t other books to read.)
YESSSSS. DAPHNE OBLITERATES IT. I hated this book so much, it was so antithetical to life and youth and kids figuring out who they are, among other things.
This is great, and now that so many critics I trust have weighed in, I think I can definitively say that Simon Reynolds has written a book-length version of an Onion article.
Whoa, pile-on! This roundtable is fantastic, but I really don’t see it as an obliteration: everyone is very respectful of Reynolds and they spend time talking about what makes the book so timely as well as picking apart its problematic aspects.
Personally, I enjoyed the shit out of this book, even though it constantly frustrated me. It’s clear, as Carl points out, that Simon’s excavation of the retro impulse from the 40s onward undercuts his thesis that retromania is a quintessential phenomenon of the present. And his constant wrestling with his own midlife crisis vis-a-vis his punk-modernist sensibilities was a bit tiresome at points, though I appreciated the fact that he laid his cards on the table. The problem is that, having declared his biases, he seems incapable of looking beyond them. Ultimately, I felt that his description of cultural practices (mainly how the internet’s shift from a scarcity economy of culture to one of abundance has generated a turn towards consumption and post-production rather than production proper) was bang-on, but his value judgments were off-base. He wasn’t able to see how these new practices transform our way of valuing culture and generate new ways of doing things, even if that means that music is “weaker” at the end of the day. Which it obviously is, in terms of its cultural heft.
I particularly appreciated Simon’s discussion of re-enactment and post-production in contemporary art, which showed a considerable literacy in the field — probably aided by the fact that Reynolds is apparently friends with Frieze editor Dan Fox. What I also especially appreciate in this roundtable is Carl’s discussion of class dynamics re: retromania, which I was constantly itching to hear more about from Reynolds himself.
Carl Wilson: Another thing is that those pop phenomena happened in a relatively brief period of prosperity and social mobility after the Second World War, and in America even after the First. If the juice has gone out of them, it may have far less to do with pop nostalgia than with the fluidity of social categories in times of enormous growth and change. Mass culture has a lot to do with interchange between classes (which in America, more than elsewhere in the 20th century, to its benefit, was also interchange between “races,” tactical alliances of fellow up-and-comers such as African Americans and Jews, to mention the one most influential on postwar pop music). If barriers to rising from working to middle-class are becoming more rigid — indeed, with the odds increasing of “falling” the other way — and cross-class empathy correspondingly diminishing, the stakes of music making may change considerably. I’ve written, for example, about the way that much of the “indie” music of the past decade seems to have become more distinctly upper-middle-class. Simon touches on this idea but much less than he blames the technological sources.
Carl is always particularly good with this sort of thing. And again:
Carl Wilson: Then again, it may be simply that the technological revolution is so transformative, of everything from individual subjectivity to social relations, that they temporarily are taking up much of the space in youth culture previously dominated by music. Maybe everyone is too busy dealing with the hurtling-comet effects of their daily Facebook, Twitter and other feeds. The recent work I see that has the frisson of previous pop revolutions are more multi- or even hyper-mediatized, from meme-based video remixes to the certifiably original art of young, queer American video artist Ryan Trecartin (for whom music, especially hip-hop, definitely plays a prominent role). The music-centred responses might just be lagging behind the past decade’s enormous sensory shift. Punk and rave kids were bored and made something to answer their boredom. Maybe no one is bored right now. Maybe we’re excessively unbored.
BOOM! Though, I think for “unbored,” one should read “distracted.”
“…Simon’s excavation of the retro impulse from the 40s onward undercuts his thesis that retromania is a quintessential phenomenon of the present.”
I agree Reynolds appears conflicted. But I don’t agree with the above criticism that he undercuts his own argument. I read the book as claiming that, yes, the retro impulse has been present as a mode of music making throughout rock’s history, but now it is the mode. We have always had some retro, but now we have retromania. It used to be a curiosity, now it’s a hyperstasis problem. Or at least someone with Reynolds’ values thinks it’s a problem, and maybe you share those values and agree with him. He seems pretty open about where he’s coming from. That’s not to claim that even this argument isn’t wonky, but that’s what I think he was getting at. So I don’t see covering the history of retro as weakening his thesis, necessarily.
