We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, revivals and reissues, remakes and mash-ups … Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival resources of rock history have been exhausted? What happens when we run out of past?
Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have reached a tipping point. Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, but never before 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 era?