retrotalk1974 - "You Can't Go Home Again"

 

There's been a surprising uptick in retrotalk recently - hence the Retrotalk2021 and Retrotalk2022 series. I've also done "Pre-Echoes of Retromania" posts about prior spurts of retro-talk in the '90s, and the '80s. Moaning and groaning about nostalgia and revivals has an extensive and a long-established history. Anxiety about it seems to come in waves then fade back into the background (perhaps because of a surge of newness in the music culture).

 Well, here below is an example of vintage retrotalk - an excellent 1974 essay by Michael Wood that originally appeared in New Society. It's the first piece in a 1977 Fontana collection of articles from New Society . 

(Which magazine should really be archived on the internet - look at the lineup of contributors here: Reyner Banham, John Berger, Angela Carter, Dennis Potter, E.P. Thompson.... People like these and Simon Frith and so forth were writing on a weekly basis about arts and culture and social trends + issues all through the '60s, '70s and '80s, from a left-wing, Brit-centric perspective. What a trove of discourse, all inaccessible unless you have academic privileges at a UK university, I should imagine). 

(I have actually contributed to New Society in a certain sense, having written for the New Statesman around the time it absorbed New Society - for a while the amalgamated periodical went by the name New Statesman & Society, if I recall right). 

Michael Wood is a Brit-born professor at Columbia University in New York (then) and later at Princeton. At the time of the Fontana collection's publication he'd written a couple of books including one titled America in the Movies. Later came The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction among other titles. 

There's also this quote in the introduction by Paul Barker:

'One cumulative effect of mass communication nowadays is that, though transient in intention, it more and more puts itself on record. So the music, manners, and modes of the past are instantly and synchronously to hand in a way they have never been before. Revivals of style can go with ever-gathering speed. The cycle, rubbish-camp-acceptable-antique, has now become almost totally telescoped. Mass communication is like the memories in a mind half-asleep. Or like your mind when drowning? In everything, the mass media are flatteners and foreshorteners, like zoom-lens photography. Every high street with the same advertised brands; every newscast with the same news; every singer with the same tune. Even what is local becomes merely another candidate for mass consumption : good for a joke by Eddie Waring on It's a Knockout.'

A couple of further examples of 1970s nostalgia discourse in the mass media