“It’s not that nothing happened in the music of the 2000s. In many ways, there was a manic bustle of micro-trends, subgenres and recombinant styles. But by far the most momentous transformations related to our modes of consumption and distribution, and these have encouraged the escalation of retromania. We’ve become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organize, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data. 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.”
Reading Retromania by Simon Reynolds.
Lots to ponder here. Implications about the now, the future, how it relates to the world we’re in. It’s fascinating.
This book was written ten years ago and Bruno Mars (and so many others, including myself) is still doing 70s/80s stuff. I keep thinking that in terms of core values, those two decades are peak musicianship: from influences to straight samples, the 1970s and 1980s boast the biggest, tastiest meal of all.
We’re still eating at that table. And that’s fine. Or is it?