Retromania with Simon Reynolds

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2011

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is cultural innovation at risk when we indulge in retromania? Music critic Simon Reynolds joins us to talk about why songs today are more unimaginative when we have unprecedented access to decades' worth of past music, the loop of re-creating old sounds, and more. His new book is Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Natalie from Boston, Massachusetts.
0:02.6	I'm Zach from Madison, Wisconsin.
0:04.8	Hi, I'm Ken from Denver.
0:06.5	The Sound of Yellow America is an independent production supported by listeners like me.
0:10.8	If you'd like to support the show like I did,
0:12.9	visit MaximumFun.org and click on Donate.
0:16.0	I'm Jesse Thorne, live on tape from My House in Los Angeles.
0:19.2	It's the Sound of Yellow America from MaximumFun.org and PRI, public radio, international.
0:30.9	It's The Sound of Yellow America.
0:32.4	I'm Jesse Thorne.
0:33.4	My guest on the program is Simon Reynolds.
0:36.3	He's a music writer who's written most extensively about
0:41.0	electronic influenced music and electronic influenced rock music, including
0:45.9	one of the seminal books about post-punk rock and roll called Rip It Up and Start Again.
0:51.2	The seminal history of Rave in the 1990s and now he's the author of Retromania,
0:57.3	Pop Culture's Addiction to its Old Past.
1:00.7	It's about the almost complete lack of anything new, aesthetically, particularly in the world of
1:09.6	rock music in the past 10 years and what that means for our cultural future.
1:15.8	Simon, welcome back to The Sound of Yellow America.
1:18.0	Thanks for having me back on the show.
1:19.5	First, let's start by defining what Retro is.
1:23.2	What's the difference between retro and, say, neo-classicism?
	...

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