Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.

The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde.

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?

Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.

Retro’s stomping ground isn’t the auction house or antique dealer but the flea market, charity shop, jumble sale and junk shop.

The downside of shuffle soon revealed itself, though. I became fascinated with the mechanism itself, and soon was always wanting to know what was coming up next. It was irresistible to click onto the next random selection. Even if it was something great, there was the possibility something greater still would flash up next.

He revels in all the empowering conveniences that the iPod offers, like being able to ‘correct’ albums by removing their weak tracks (even on Beatles LPs, where he removes all the Ringo songs),

(Mind you, according to Walter Benjamin, the twentieth century’s great philosopher of collecting, browsing and what we’d now call vintage shopping, ‘the non-reading of books’ is a defining characteristic of serious bibliomaniacs; he cites Anatole France, who blithely admitted that he’d barely read one-tenth of the books in his library.)

old music these days. He explained that the industry divided releases up into ‘current’ (which spanned from day one of release to fifteen months later) and ‘catalogue’ (from the sixteenth month onwards). But catalogue itself was divided up into two categories: what was relatively recent, and what was ‘deep catalogue’, to which music was assigned three years after release.