Within music criticism and journalism in recent years there has been a growing fixation with what has come to be known as ‘retromania’, or ‘pop culture’s addiction to its own past.’[1] The overriding thesis of this critique is that recent technological and cultural circumstances have led to something of a regression in the creative impulses of musicians, leading to a lack of innovative styles and an overreliance on pre-existing forms as the inspiration for ‘new works’. This criticism has been particularly championed by Simon Reynolds, who articulates his misgivings about contemporary pop music as follows:
Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.[2]
This critique would appear to be derived from the struggle for meaningful cultural production under late capitalism and its link to the effect of capital on the compression of time, echoing David Harvey’s notion that ‘volatility and ephemerality…make it hard to maintain any firm sense of continuity. Past experience gets compressed into some overwhelming present.’[3] Along with this comes the development of technologies that permit and encourage a trend for copious collecting, archiving and memorialising, meaning that, as Reynolds sees it:
We’ve become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, 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.[4]
It is this thinking that can be seen as the origin of Reynolds’ work, but the conclusions he ultimately draws are somewhat misguided. There is certainly some credence to the link between so-called retromania and temporal compression, but Reynolds’ mistake is to leave unanalysed the relationship between the past and the present, and the subsequent implications for artistic creativity. As such, while much of the retromania critique is somewhat valid, it still suffers from an inadequate conception of the actual human experience of temporality.
Bound up in this analysis is an overlooking of the way in which music can be seen to interact with the past; namely, there is the tendency in Reynolds’ work to criticise ‘music made by young musicians who draw heavily on the past, often in a clearly signposted and arty way’[5] without actually acknowledging the role that retromania can play in the present. With this in mind, here we will examine various conceptions of temporality and explore their implications for a more nuanced analysis of the alleged retromanic tendencies of contemporary popular music.
A fundamental way in which the human experience of temporality is ultimately incongruous with the retromania critique of popular music becomes apparent through an analysis of the way time can be seen to ‘flow’. Parallels can be drawn between the conception of temporal ‘progression’ and the way different styles, genres and aesthetic sensibilities develop and change in pop music, as this would seem to be the main way in which many artists are said to exhibit their retromanic tendencies. Key to this is Henri Bergson’s conception of time as a continuous progression, as opposed to a series of distinct, separable moments. Experiencing temporality in this way means that:
‘we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change. This amounts to saying that there is no essential difference between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state. If the state which ‘remains the same’ is more varied than we think, on the other hand the passing from one state to another resembles, more than we imagine, a single state being prolonged; the transition is continuous.’[6]
Essentially then this continual flow of time means that the separation of one moment from another is at best artificial and at worst impossible, and thus it is problematic to separate one moment of time as being ‘the past’, distinct from the present that is continually unfurling before us. As David Couzens Hoy suggests, ‘the ordinary conception of time makes the mistake of separating the temporal into separate domains, depending on the status of the Nows, whether they are over, yet to come, or actually occurent.’[7] However, the conception of time as a continuum and not a ‘jump’ from one moment to the next does not necessarily mean that any notion of the past is dispensed with in favour of an always-occurring present. With this in mind, Bergson suggests that:
‘duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present – no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.’[8]
Thus we can say that the past is always present in ‘the now’, in the sense that, as Bergson continues, ‘it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it’[9], meaning that ‘even though we have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us.’[10] We therefore cannot distinguish the past from what we perceive as the present moment, as that which has already happened is effectively still happening, its connection to the present palpable, unbroken and inseparable. Thus if ‘our past remains present to us’[11] then there is no looking back to the past in works that have been described as retromanic, as it is not that there isn’t ‘anything but the present’[12], more that the past exists inside the present.
We can see this manifest, for example, in the music of The Avalanches, whose work is archetypal of the way in which music so dismissively labelled as retromanic instead simply exhibits the true way in which temporality is experienced in contemporary culture. Their 2000 album Since I Left You – itself often referenced by Reynolds in his work – exemplifies a conception of temporality in which, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, ‘The words “future,” “past,” and “present” disappear, and time itself figures as the exploded unity of three temporal extases.’[13] While this record is ostensibly a collage of already-existing sounds (i.e. within the past) and ‘denigrated music’[14], it is not reminiscent of music of ‘the past’ in any way – it cannot be explicitly categorised within any ‘old’ musical genre, for instance – and yet, due to the manner of its composition (there are thousands of samples comprising the album), the past is inherently bound up within it.
Reynolds, while somewhat complimentary about the resultant aesthetic, is often content to criticise the conditions that permit this form of artistic creativity, suggesting that cultural artefacts such as this are indicative of how ‘the presence of the past in our lives has increased immeasurably and insidiously. Old stuff either directly permeates the present, or lurks just beneath the surface of the current, in the form of…windows to other times.’[15] The mistake here is the assumption that the past is being resurrected from its grave, and that it should be separate and unimposing on the present, as if this is a natural law that musicians such as The Avalanches are somehow perverting. However, on the contrary, it is the past that inherently informs the present, as there is no clean break between what is happening and what has already happened. So when the past does manifest in The Avalanches’ work it is as a natural and inherent component of the present. There is no ‘othering’ or fetishising of the past on Since I Left You; it is simply a part of the compositional process of creating a new work.
The way in which the already-existing past contributes to the creative development of The Avalanches is therefore reminiscent of Bergson’s assessment of the human will’s relation to this onward march of time. Bergson asserts that ‘consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history.’[16] So then, even when musicians appear to call upon the past to create new a work, they do so in a manner that naturally assimilates it into the present. Music is therefore always ‘new’, always in the present, and as such the notion that music can be retromanic is something of a fallacy. Music that is labelled retromanic cannot be tied to the past, as its status in the present is more than just simply a repeat of that which has already happened. As Bergson continues:
Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any state, although superficially identical with another, from ever repeating in its very depth. That is why our duration is irreversible. We could not live over again a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing the memory of all that had followed. Even could we erase this memory from our intellect, we could not from our will.[17]
This image of constant change as the true form of temporality and irreversible duration suggests that it is rather disingenuous to condemn artists for invoking the past when in actual fact this is simply the subjective experience of temporality as manifested in music. The past thus flows through the artist in the present, influences their creative impulses, resulting in something new occurring. This conception of The Avalanches’ music therefore exemplifies the notion that it is inherently problematic to call any musical work retromanic. If we are being generous we can say that all music is inherently retromanic in that the past naturally occurs in the present, or we can determine that the need to identify retromania as a distinct categorisation of music is rather unnecessary.
Closely linked to this is the way that musical genres and styles develop, and the effect that temporality has on the conception of when a music can be though of as ‘new’, and when it is derivative of an already-existing form. In the same way that time is a continual process and it is artificial to isolate a single ‘moment’, so too can we say that music ‘changes without ceasing’[18]. Therefore, while Reynolds claims that the ultimate consequence of retromania is that ‘music has been depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness’[19], we can frame this simply as a pessimistic, even misguided, interpretation of Bergson’s notion that ‘each [moment] is something new added to what was before.’[20] With this in mind, Bergson’s conception of temporality ensures that we can regard musical progress not reductively as retromanic or derivative, but as a continual process of development and change, in recognition that each musical state is a ‘moment in a history…an original moment of a no less original history.’[21]
Within particular genres, therefore, we cannot simply categorise music that exhibits a variation on already-existing generic properties as derivative or a poor imitation. Reynolds is fond, for example, of placing dubstep within its wider context, acknowledging the heritage of dance music culture to which it owes its existence, as a way of showing that even the closest thing to a ‘new music’ in the 21st century is in fact just a retromanic retread of the past. He characterises dubstep as ‘tied to the past’[22], ‘rave’s afterlife’[23] and ‘essentially extentions of the ideas and ideals of the previous decade’[24], which belies his apparent belief that a truly original and innovative genre should somehow be able to spontaneously generate itself within a vacuum. It is reductive to be at pains to point out that the past exists inside the present, but separate from it, as if this perceivable linearity is in itself a display of retromania that discredits the work’s cultural value to the present. Evidence that a musical work has precedents in the past does not suggest that it cannot be the catalyst for something new. As Bergson states, ‘to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to on creating oneself endlessly.’[25] With this in mind, the suggestion that music that exists in the present is not producing anything ‘new’ is patently absurd.
From this we can see that the generic properties of any given musical style are never static and have no fixed point of anchorage in time, and so it is false to dismiss a whole genre as retromanic when there is no temporally static origin point. The generic aesthetic properties of any music – given its setting in a continually changing temporality – is never static, and so cannot be thought of as retromanic when there is no one temporally-fixed aesthetic from which it can be said to derive.
With this assuredly applied on a macro level to an entire genre, we can also make similar claims for individual artists. As Ernst Bloch attests to, ‘clearly nothing detracts from even the more important artists as badly as inserting or fixing them into some succession of developments in craft, into a history of merely mediating, reinforcing, technical formula.’[26] This claim has a direct implication for a true conception of the way that artists deal with the music of the past, as it suggests that the way individuals subjectively experience temporality is best understood if the music itself is delivered from its relationship to time entirely. As Bloch suggests, ‘if a composer can feel so independent of the will of his epoch…then it is surely not the essence of the music…which can be economically and sociologically categorized’[27], and thus neither can essence be tied unremittingly to its temporal context.
This separation of musical essence from temporality is certainly something that the producer Saint Pepsi exploits in his music. Largely based on samples of already-existing music, his 2014 work Gin City contains recognisable sounds from an array of pre-existing songs from ‘the past’, homogenising them within the work in a way that effectively compresses time to the point where it can no longer be said to be perceivable within the work. The album’s title track, for example, contains within it a vocal excerpt from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get it On’ (recorded in 1973), the infamous and much-sampled so-called ‘Yeah! Woo!’ break (a sample taken from a song recorded in 1972 and ubiquitous in popular music ever since in a multitude of forms – thus itself exemplifying Bergson’s conception of moments in time being ‘something new added to what was before’[28]), trap-derived beats (very much a style embedded in the present), and even one of Saint Pepsi’s own songs (‘Have Faith’, released in 2013).
The key to the use of all these previously temporally disparate sources is that they are all exploited for their decontextualised aesthetic value – their temporality is simply not relevant to the creator, who sees them all as part of his own subjective present. We can thus relate this to Bloch’s conception of non-simultaneity, particularly the notion that ‘Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean they are living at the same time with others.’ [29] We can relate this idea to cultural production and artistry in the sense that depending on the ‘Nows’ that one has experienced, different musics are available from the past to make use of in the present. This would suggest that to some extent contemporary pop music is essentially ‘atemporal’: it can only exist in the present ‘Now’, and yet encompasses music from innumerable ‘Nows’. Saint Pepsi thus appropriates the essence of pre-existing music in a way that is separate and irrespective of temporality.
This means that the fully realised aesthetic form can be seen to exist outside of temporality. This is something that Bloch would appear to attest to, particularly in his suggestion that in order to fully comprehend an artist’s work aesthetically it is important:
‘to construct for every truly great composer an individual house where he can live for himself as a particular “state” even beyond his talents. In here he is free, brings in only his own soul. This is self-evidently something different again from what circulates among people, what unites them in mere contemporaneity.’[30]
We can perceive then that with Gin City Saint Pepsi is reclaiming cultural artefacts from the past and reaffirming them into his own temporal experience of the present. This once again confirms the vitality and value of the past’s place within the present, and further discredits the notion that such so-called retromanic tendencies preclude an authentic artistic expression of the cultural present.
A key problem with the retromania critique is that it is enchanted by what it identifies as the spirit of modernism, particularly the idea that it was a great fissure in the progression of time and broke off relations with the past, and that all subsequent music should aspire to do likewise if it is to gain cultural value. Thus the positioning of retromania as the antithesis of creating something ‘new’ would seem to derive from the idea that it is ‘backwards looking’, seeking to gain inspiration from ‘past’ forms that it needs to have discarded. However, as has been discussed, the notion that a moment can be born out of nothing, as a break from all that has gone before it in time, is simply not possible. This temporal interpretation of modernism is certainly something that disconcerted Andreas Huyssen, who identifies ‘the familiar trope in cultural criticism which suggests that enlightened modernization liberates us from tradition and superstitions, that modernity and the past are inherently antagonistic to each other.’[31] However, as Huyssen points out:
Remembrance shapes our links to the past, and the ways we remember define us in the present. As individuals and societies, we need the past to construct and anchor our identities and to nurture a vision of the future.[32]
Thus even a musical style intent on radical change is still going to be constructed from ideas from the past: the idea that this may not be the case would appear to be a misconception. Reynolds’ modernism-in-pop genre of choice is invariably punk (or post-punk); though as we have seen, it would be ridiculous to claim that punk stood in its own present as a dividing line between the past and the future, with all that had come before it being discarded. As Christopher Doll points out, ‘A reader of Retromania could easily get the impression that all before-punk music was leading up to punk, and that all after-punk music was a response to it (or at least a departure from it).’[33] This reading of history would be a false one, and such an argument unfortunately looms large over the retromania critique. This ‘irrepressible desire to position punk as the reference point for the entirety of popular music history’[34] creates a false impression of how music has previously interacted with its own past.
As such, Reynolds and the retromania critique can be said to be guilty of partaking in, as Huyssen puts it, ‘a selective and permanently shifting dialogue between the present and the past’.[35] The consequences of this are twofold: firstly, it does not acknowledge that ‘our present will inevitably have an impact on what and how we remember’[36], meaning that Reynolds does not have the self-awareness that he himself is interacting with the past inside the present in order to make use of it for his own means, in this case using the myth of punk’s break with the past to criticise its contemporary equivalents for not doing the same. Secondly, it means that critics decry the lack of continual breaks with the past, breaks that are only to be expected due to the retromania critique’s very own relationship with the past. In many ways then it is the retromania critique itself that is guilty of retromania, in that its own misunderstanding of the relationship between past and present has led to a longing for a never-existent time in which the past did not influence the present. The consequence of this is that it falsely represents contemporary musicians’ relationship to the past, and ultimately misreads what is their authentic expression of their own temporal experience.
Therefore, in order to fully comprehend the true relationship between subjective temporality and musical creativity it is necessary to discard the notion that an unmooring of the present from the past is imperative for the creation of something new. Martin Halliwell and Paul Hegarty touch upon this in their analysis of progressive rock music, suggesting that the genre ‘eludes the ‘myth of the avant-garde that the world has been reborn for the first time, and instead adopts the properly modernist attitude of referencing its precursors in continued innovation. We, as listeners, readers and critics, see a continuum of avant-gardes as if this was how it happened, because now it has always already happened.’[37] This concept of the ‘always already’[38] is crucial for an understanding of the relationship between temporal experience and creativity, as it shows that the past has always been the past if one hasn’t experienced it in their own lifetime, and yet it still makes itself known in their present regardless. This means that, paradoxically, to contemporary musicians the ‘always already’ music of the past is both new and old at the same time. It is a misinterpretation of this paradox and an ignorance of the blurring between when something is old and when it is new – whether it is the ‘true’ present or the ‘past within the present’ – that leads to the misidentification of this new creativity as being retromanic. In short, the retromania critique of contemporary music arises from an ability of critics to come to terms with the idea that, as Bloch suggests, ‘Once something has been discovered, later periods have no interest in it or empathy for it as a technical problem or a fresh innovation.’[39]
In the music made by Zomby we can see an example of how this blurring between the old and the new causes a false diagnosis of retromania, rather than recognising a subjective experience of temporality manifesting itself musically. His 2008 album Where Were U in ’92? in particular has been criticised by Reynolds for ‘repeating and reproducing the past, rather than pushing forward into the future,’[40] suggesting that in making music apparently so rooted in some previous time period Zomby has suffered from ‘a dissipation of creative energy’[41]. Though decried here as a pastiche of early nineties rave culture, the key to the album is that Zomby was not ‘there’ in 1992; instead, the characteristics of the music of that year has been always already in existence from his temporal vantage point. For Zomby this is not his past: it is a music that exists in his personal present like any other, and thus cannot accurately be described as retromanic.
The foundation of this is the notion that, to musicians in the present, all music of the past – with its indisputable active presence in the ‘Now’ – was always already in existence as perceived by them in their subjective experience of temporality. To anybody in the present, therefore, the past has already happened, but is also unavoidable in the ‘Now’. It might appear to be retromanic to a third party for whom this music existed in their own living memory, but to the creator this is a music that is part of the present like any other. It would seem then that the concept of ‘newness’ is tied to each individual’s temporal experience: what one person may be able to identify as coming from the past as they have experienced it ‘before’ in a previous moment has always been part of another individual’s present. So while Reynolds laments that ‘there has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past’[42], we cannot discard the idea that, as Huyssen states, ‘the strongly remembered past will always be inscribed in our present, from feeding our unconscious desires to guiding our most conscious actions.’[43]
The existence of the past inside the present is obviously a major catalyst for the music an artist such as Zomby is inspired to create. Thus, in an era in which, as Reynolds himself writes, ‘every pop-culture scrap’[44] from the past has the potential to be preserved in the present, the music discussed here is truly music of the ‘now’, authentically reflective of the way temporality is truly experienced in contemporary culture. While retromania can be said to ‘exist’ to some extent, it is not as a passive longing or a nostalgia for something that no longer exists. Rather than an obsession with the past in the present, it is an authentic acknowledgement that the past is part of the present. It is music as culturally relevant and reflective of the present ‘present’ in a way that is as valid as in any other time period.
To illustrate this, the music of Girl Talk – who Reynolds himself seems to place as an antithesis to the cultural function he thinks music should perform – is a complete exhibition of contemporary temporal experience in music. Reynolds saves particular vitriol for the ‘mashups’ that Girl Talk creates, stating:
Romping across five decades of rock, rap and R&B, [Girl Talk] celebrated the crass, pounding, instant-gratification appeal of pop at its most populist. Mash-ups mash the history of pop like potatoes, into indistinct, digital-data-grey pulp, a blood-sugar blast of empty carbohydrate energy, flava-less and devoid of nutritional value. For all their aura of mischief and cheeky fun, mash-ups exude pathos. This is a barren genre – nothing will come from it. Not even a mash-up. [45]
Once again, in Girl Talk’s temporal experience the past was always already compressed together, as the aggregate of all previous musical works manifesting itself in Girl Talk’s present, his own personal temporality. There seems to be the suggestion here that this music has no cultural value simply because it is – as far as Reynolds sees it – from the past. However, Reynolds is mistaken as to how musical value is created in Girl Talk’s music: in the same way that there is no distinct divide between the past and the present in terms of how they are experienced in the ‘now’, the previous temporality of the appropriated source material has no relevance in terms of the aesthetic (and cultural) value of, say, Girl Talk’s 2008 release Feed the Animals, which contains over 300 samples from already-existing pop songs across its 53-minute duration.
What we see here, then, is an authentic expression of temporal compression manifesting itself musically, reflective of Huyssen’s diagnosis that ‘both personal and social memory today are affected by an emerging new structure of temporality generated by the quickening pace of material life on the one hand and by the acceleration of media images and information on the other.’[46] The implication then is that in a culture that generates intense memorialisation and temporal compression, combined with the past’s natural inhabitation of the present, a musical work that seeks to ‘flatten out all the differences and divisions from music history’[47] seems wholly apt and pertinent. If this is indeed the case, then Girl Talk’s music merely replicates the cultural conditions in which it finds itself, leaving Reynolds’s assertion that contemporary musicians have become ‘curators and archivists’[48] rather than ‘pioneers and innovators’[49] somewhat redundant.
Ultimately, it would appear that the retromania critique of popular music is based on a misreading of the subjective nature of temporality, and how time is actually experienced. Based on the aforementioned propositions that the past is an inherent element of the temporal experience of the present, it is thus overly simplistic to draw a link between what some would identify as a creative malaise and its relation to time. With this in mind, it is perfectly legitimate to venture that this criticism of retromania is largely irrelevant in comprehending the link between temporality and creativity. Indeed, as Doll suggests, ‘some of Reynolds’ topics have as much – if not more – to do with intertextuality than with retro’[50], further underlining the notion that temporality is not necessarily pertinent when discussing the creative process of contemporary pop musicians. In the same way that time has been compressed culturally, the perception of subjective time has been accelerated to the point where it is barely perceptible; it is this, not retromania, that manifests itself in popular culture. Thus it would appear that the idea that musicians are retromanic due to a cultural-creative inertia is wholly false, and that it is this inertia itself that is the driving force of creativity.
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Bloch, Ernst, ‘Nonsychronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, New German Critique, 11 (1977), 22-38 (p. 22).Bloch, Ernst, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. by Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
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Hegarty, Paul and Martin Halliwell, Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s (London: Continuum, 2011).
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Reynolds, Simon, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2013).
Reynolds, Simon, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011).
Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis’ in Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 52-90.
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[1] Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011).
[2] Reynolds, Retromania, p. x.
[3] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 291.
[4] Reynolds, Retromania, p. xxi.
[5] Reynolds, Retromania, p. xiii.
[6] Henri Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’ in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 68-71, p.69.
[7] David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012), p. 60.
[8] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70.
[9] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70.
[10] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70.
[11] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70.
[12] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70.
[13] Paul Ricoeur, ‘Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis’ in Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 52-90, p. 61.
[14] Reynolds, Retromania, p. 358.
[15] Reynolds, Retromania, p. 57.
[16] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70.
[17] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70-71.
[18] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 70.
[19] Reynolds, Retromania, p. 419-420.
[20] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 71.
[21] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 71.
[22] Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), p. 645.
[23] Reynolds, Energy Flash, p. 645.
[24] Reynolds, Energy Flash, p. 647.
[25] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 71.
[26] Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. by Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 38.
[27] Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, p. 41.
[28] Bergson, ‘From Creative Evolution’, p. 71.
[29] Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsychronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, New German Critique, 11 (1977), 22-38 (p. 22).
[30] Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, p. 40.
[31] Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(London: Routledge, 1995), p. 253.
[32] Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 249.
[33] Christopher Doll, ‘Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds’, Notes, 68 (2012), 763-765 (p. 764).
[34] Doll, ‘Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds’, p.765
[35] Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 250.
[36] Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 250.
[37] Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell, Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 12.
[38] Hegarty and Halliwell, Beyond and Before, p. 12.
[39] Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, p. 38.
[40] Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, p. 707
[41] Reynolds, Energy Flash, p. 708
[42] Reynolds, Retromania, p. xiii.
[43] Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 253.
[44] Reynolds, Retromania, p. 26.
[45] Reynolds, Retromania, p. 360.
[46] Huyssen, Twilight Memories, p. 253.
[47] Reynolds, Retromania, p. 360.
[48] Reynolds, Retromania, p. xx.
[49] Reynolds, Retromania, p. xx.
[50] Doll, ‘Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds’, p.765.
Disposable Everything 