I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification.
The whole Spike issue is themed around nostalgia and related subjects and well worth a peruse.
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I suppose it's nice to have done a book that enjoys a half-life or two... it is surprising how often I still get asked to comment on these sort of themes: retro-paralysis, cultural stagnation, hauntology...
I don't mind, but in truth my mind has moved on to other preoccupations... mainly the ideas surrounding the new book, due out in June next year.
Which as it happens has a completely different perspective on "the rhetorics of temporality" than Retromania.
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Keeping the retrochat going have been other writers with books that either extend the polemic or refute it....
In the first camp, there's W. David Marx with Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, for which I gave this blurb:
“The first quarter of the 21st Century had a
paradoxical feeling – so much happened and yet nothing happened at all. A
triumph of forensic research and pattern recognition, Blank Space cuts
through the bustle and the babble, makes a senseless time make sense. W. David
Marx diagnoses the malaise and even proposes a course of treatment. This is a book
that’s fun to agree with and even more fun to argue with.”
Here is a fairly positive response to Marx's argument from Celine Nguyen at Asterisk and a far less friendly take from Emily Watlington at Artnews. Here's an extract at The Atlantic.
(The one thing I didn't get with Marx's book is why he titled it Blank Space, which to me seems like either a positive image - possibility, an open frontier - or a neutral one. As a trope of barrenness in re. the first 25 years of the 21stC it doesn't quite compute for me).
As regards the counter-argument, the Full Space perspective - "these be years of plenty, innovations up the wazoo, you just need to gouge loose the wax clogging up your ears, O geriatics" - there's the fairly recent book Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age by Liam Inscoe-Jones.
Here is a wide-ranging discussion Inscoe-Jones had with Chal Ravens at Tribune a few months ago, and which has suddenly jumped out from behind the paywall. It's title is Has Pop Finally Eaten Itself? (Variations on that trope certainly have eaten themselves by this point!)
The piece's url, I note wryly, includes the words "after-retromania".
Would that we were! In both senses of the word - the discourse, and the underlying phenomenon itself.
Clearly there's enough evidence - currently, but probably at most moments in the history of pop culture, apart from very obvious surge phases like mid-Sixties or punk/New Wave - that could be marshalled to sustain either argument.
There's always a ton of lame stuff around - revival, retread, remake, etc.
Equally, you can always point to people doing cool things in music - even during the years when I was writing Retromania, I never had any trouble coming up with a substantial end-of-year list of music I liked and thought was doing interesting things. Inventive, if not quite innovative.
The problem is more on the level of: what is the most that you can imagine happening with this cool / clever / inventive / conceivably even innovative music? Is it going to break out all across the surfaces of everyday life? Shake things up?
I would say "is it going to change the sound of the radio?" (thinking of Timbaland, or New Wave, or psychedelia - the instantiation of a new sonic template on a culture-wide basis).
But radio isn't a thing anymore. Who listens to the radio?
That is the big structural problem, which Ravens and Inscoe-Jones touch on in their dialogue. Monoculture still exists, but its mechanisms now - TikTok etc - agitate against anything lasting or substantial.
In terms of "change the sound of the radio" - the last time that happened as far as I can tell is the Auto-Tune trap moment. (Which is the last moment I personally listened to the radio regularly). (And which was also my kind of "psychedelic rap" as opposed to the stuff Inscoe-Jones reps for - Danny Brown etc).
But then again.... doesn't it all seem so trivial, as something to be concerned about, next to what's happening in this country, and in too many other places around the world - including the UK? Political retromania is the true nightmare.
