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JAZZ AND POPULAR Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. By Simon Reynolds. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011. [xxxvi, 458 p. ISBN 9780865479944. $18.] Bibliography, index.
Simon Reynolds is a prominent journalist of popular music with a substantial record of publication to his name. Retromania, his most recent book, explores one of the most important facets of contemporary popular culture: the ongoing "uses and abuses of the pop past" (p. xiii). Reynolds touches on this trend as manifested in various cultural forms-fashion, television, movies, theater-but the spotlight is squarely on music. In this way, the book's rather general subtitle and front cover illustration (on the American version, the upper half of a person decked out in assorted bygone clothes and accessories, each accompanied by decade-specifying markers) are a bit misleading.
Retromania largely deals with popular music since the millennium, although it also offers a good amount of commentary on music dating back to the 1960s. (Reynolds dates the point in time at which musical retro began-" 'the Rift of Retro' "-to the mid-sixties, p. 185.) "Retro," according to the author, describes "pretty much anything that relates to the relatively recent past of popular culture" (p. xiii). Working under such a broad definition, the book has a lot of ground to cover, and at nearly five hundred pages, Retromania seems to want to tackle absolutely everything relevant to the central theme. One could easily criticize the author for failing to reach this unattainable goal, or, conversely, for not focusing on fewer issues in the interest of succinctness. Yet Reynolds does an admirable job of engaging a slew of intricate issues, even if the text reads like a long series of short articles on a dozen or so related topics, without a strong sense of linear flow. The text's serial quality is exacerbated by the presence of sixteen subsections printed at the bottom of certain pages throughout the book; set off by smaller, darker font, these subsections function as extremely long explanatory footnotes, elaborating on points brought up in the main passages. The book features no actual footnotes or endnotes; "footnotes and additional mate - rial" are said to be found at a web address (http://retromaniafootnotes.blogspot .com) given in the table of contents (p. viii),...