"This is the way pop ends," acclaimed music critic Simon Reynolds writes, "not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university." The phenomenon in recent culture--evident in art, food, film, advertising, fashion, toys, but especially music--to revive, retool and re-live our immediate past has haunted Reynolds throughout his laudable career. Part pop-music history, part philosophical treatise, part memoir, Retromania explores, among other things, this causality dilemma: "Is nostalgia stopping our culture's ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward?"
Whether describing a New York Dolls concert, philosophizing on the difference between vinyl and digital or tracing the history of post-punk, Reynolds is scathing and articulate, relevant and ever critical. He recounts his "visceral" discomfort at the introduction of the iPod and rails against mash-ups, which came back "like a badly digested dinner" in the work of Girl Talk. With astounding thoroughness, expertise and maybe a tinge of doomsday-calling, Reynolds analyzes how the instant accessibility made possible by the Internet has changed the ways in which we collect and experience music. Encyclopedic in scope yet focused in theme, Retromania is a brainy examination of the recycled zeitgeist that defines our time in terms of times that have come before. --Claire Fuqua Anderson, fiction writer