rhapsode

by Sha Frasier.the Continuing Education Project.New York.

Source

Reynolds — Retromania

Cited in 5 notes
Changelog, Fisher — Ghosts of My Life, Hauntology, Lost futures, Reynolds — Energy Flash

Find it in a library:WorldCat·Open Library

Author: Simon Reynolds
Title: Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past
Year: 2011
Type: Book (Faber and Faber; in the United States, Faber and Faber, Inc., an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past is a book by the British critic Simon Reynolds, published by Faber and Faber in 2011 and in the United States by Faber and Faber, Inc., an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It argues that the 2000s were “the ‘Re’ Decade,” and that pop culture’s appetite for its own past has no precedent in history. Its evidence is pop’s culture of reunions, museums, documentaries and re-enactments, music and memory in the time of YouTube, record collecting, revival cults and the never-ending fifties revival, together with a chapter on sampling and the British hauntology of Ghost Box. Reynolds includes himself in the diagnosis as someone who enjoys much of retro yet still feels it to be shameful, and the book ends on his belief that the future is still out there. Reviews were mostly favorable. Kirkus called it “important” and “alarming” reading, while Noel Murray, in the Columbia Journalism Review, found that it often sounded an alarm out of proportion to what was at stake. Mark Fisher took up its term “retro-mania” in Ghosts of My Life.

Faber and Faber published the book in 2011, in 458 pages, and its American imprint, part of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, published it in the United States in July 2011.1, 2 Its introduction is titled “The ‘Re’ Decade,” and its three parts, “Now,” “Then” and “Tomorrow,” run from chapters on museums, reunions, rock documentaries and re-enactments, on music and memory in the time of YouTube and on record collecting, through revival cults, punk’s reactionary roots and the never-ending fifties revival, to “Ghosts of Futures Past: Sampling, Hauntology and Mash-Ups.”1

Reynolds writes that the first ten years of the twenty-first century “turned out to be the ‘Re’ Decade,” dominated by “the ‘re-’ prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments.” “There has never been a society in human history,” he writes, “so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.”3 In the introduction he asks of himself, “Given that I enjoy many aspects of retro, why do I still feel deep down that it is lame and shameful?”3 The chapter on hauntology treats the British school of Ghost Box and its allies, Mordant Music and Moon Wiring Club among them.3 The book’s last sentence is “I still believe the future is out there.”3

Ann Powers said in a Bookforum roundtable in January 2012 that the book had drawn mostly glowing reviews and was being cited in album write-ups.4 Kirkus, in its issue of July 1, 2011, summed it up as “Important—and alarming—reading for pop-music aficionados.”2 Noel Murray, in the Columbia Journalism Review, called Reynolds a keen writer with “the mind of a critic and the heart of an enthusiast” and agreed that nostalgia might be “a stealth form of conservatism,” but found that the book “frequently comes off as way too alarmist, especially considering how little is actually at stake.”5 In the same roundtable Carl Wilson wondered whether Reynolds was “mistaking a personal, midlife experience for objective cultural truth,” and Daphne Carr called the book’s neglect of hip hop “too glaring an omission.”4

Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life (2014) that temporal disjuncture ought to feel uncanny, but that with the predominance of “what Reynolds calls ‘retro-mania,’” anachronism “is now taken for granted.”6 Reynolds later wrote Futuromania (2024), a book about music that sounds like the future, and said that it “isn’t really an answer to Retromania, or even a sequel. It’s more like a companion volume.”7

Key contributions

  • The 2000s as the “‘Re’ Decade,” a culture organized around revival, reissue and re-enactment.
  • Pop’s relation to its own past traced through museums, reunions, YouTube, record collecting and revival cults.
  • A chapter on sampling and the British hauntology of Ghost Box.

See also

  • Energy Flash — Reynolds’s 1998 history of rave
  • Lost futures — the idea that the future of pop stopped arriving
  • Sampling — the technique the book’s hauntology chapter centers on

Footnotes

  1. Open Library’s record of the Faber edition, which gives the contents (accessed October 21, 2026); the titles verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  2. Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2011, which gives the US publication date of July 26, 2011 (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  3. Reynolds, Retromania, read through Open Library’s search inside the Faber edition (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Retromania: A Roundtable with Ann Powers, Carl Wilson, and Daphne Carr, Bookforum, January 3, 2012 (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  5. Noel Murray, “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2011 (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  6. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (2014), read through Open Library’s search inside the book (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  7. Lainie Wallace’s interview with Reynolds, Metal Magazine (accessed October 21, 2026); verbatim. ↩

Published August 7, 2026