We live in times where pop culture got stuck in a permanent state of “looking back”: Resurrections of long dead-believed bands with their subsequent never-ending reunion tours, extensive reissues of classics, box-sets jam-packed with outtakes and alternative versions, remakes and sequels franchise pictures and movie cult classics, nostalgia/memorabilia shows and illustrated books about third-rate TV-stars from our collective childhood.
But: What happens when pop “runs out” of the past? Are we heading towards an ecological and cultural catastrophe when the vaults of pop culture have been plundered out?
Simon Reynolds, one of the most important contemporary music journalists, claims, that we’ve exceeded this critical point already a long time ago. Even if society dissected its previous decades… never before were we so obsessed with the cultural products of “our past”. “Retromania” is the first book which deals with every facet of the retro industry and questions the very root of pop – originality, innovation and subversion! Don’t we just have to abandon these virtues and finally admit that pop stucks in an eternal “loop” of sampling, repetition and musealization.
Conference Retromania
Org: dot.pop