Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

<p>One of <i>The Telegraph</i>'s Best Music Books 2011 </p><p>We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? </p><p>Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity -- the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism -- never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. <i>Retromania </i>is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?</p>