Eugene weekly., October 27, 2011, Page 41, Image 41

books
BY ANDY VALENTINE
Will the Real Pop Culture
Please Stand Up?
Retromania and the search for originality
W
e live in a culture dominated by
high speeds, convenience and
ever-expanding
eclecticism.
Where signifi cant cultural movements
once gripped the world, fads and trends
now cut shallow ripples in the fabric of
local society.
Today’s popular culture is, in a
fundamental sense, built entirely around
instant gratifi cation and nostalgia as
these phenomena masquerade in place of
originality. This statement may seem bold
— brash, even — but it is this same notion
that becomes a startlingly blunt hypothesis
in Simon Reynolds’ Retromania: Pop
Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (Faber
& Faber; paperback, $18).
Reynolds, a human encyclopedia of
music culture, pulls the reader through his
book like a hot knife through butter. He’s
clearly a talented writer and has killer form
and voice when he puts pen to paper (or
fi ngers to keyboard) — from a stylistic
standpoint these are excellent traits to
possess.
Reynolds possesses a wicked sense
of humor, too: It’s lines like “to venerate
artworks from the past was like wasting
one’s elan vital on something inert and
decayed; like fucking a corpse” that make
Retromania gripping. If you go into this
book expecting cleanliness and godliness
from start to fi nish, you’re going to be
disappointed.
Beneath the rugged exterior that these
instances convey, however, Reynolds
triumphs through the sheer scope of his
knowledge — from the music, fi lms
and television shows he cites to the
people, places and things that made them
signifi cant, he’s incredibly well informed.
It takes fi nesse to explain the origins of
the word “nostalgia” alongside anecdotes
from great experiences with music and
make it interesting; it takes real skill to
use all of this in order to inspire a genuine
craving for the past in an unwitting reader.
So, yeah, this book is pretty much like a
musically erudite Inception.
With this in mind, there are defi nite
points at which Reynolds verges on
information overload — a complication,
perhaps, that goes with vast knowledge —
and he has to reign himself in.
This aside, there are very few moments
that force the mind away from the subject
at hand. I found myself drifting from the
book every now and then (only to discover,
as is the norm, that I had some pages to
re-read), but during these blips I found
that I was focused on a deep re-hashing of
everything Reynolds had just told me.
At its core, Retromania not only argues
that the past will always be a more desirable
entity than the present; it also stands as a
didactic analysis of the human condition
through decades of what some would
denounce as pure, cycling unoriginality.
Pop culture is one hell of a remixed ride
through time, and Simon Reynolds is
fearless in his exploration of it.
ew
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EUGENE WEEKLY OCTOBER 27, 2011 41