Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past Book

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?Read More