panI finally made it through this book - wanted to skip a lot of times. The basic concept is a good one, showing how our society recycles the last decades - mainly music, but art and fashion as well. The chapters normally start with good statements and explanations but end with a total chaos of too many details. Too many bands, songs and albums - in the end the book is a never-ending list, which makes it almost unreadable for ordinary people like me.
Although I really like to hold a book in my hands and to flick through the pages, there are a lot of arguments speaking for ereaders I can‘t deny, like the comments or the translator. 😊
On our way back to Germany, luckily I don‘t have to drive, that‘s why I‘m able to read.
#retromania #simonreynolds #reynolds
Thoughtful insight about pop culture and nostalgia
so-soReynolds takes the reader on a cultural tour of every backward-looking music fad from the 1950s until 2005. It's interesting for 150 pages, and then it starts to feel like he's just showing off; it's a lot of detail without a lot of direction. He only sandwiches an actual hypothesis about why the present's love of the past is so prevalent into the last few pages. Ultimately an interesting but unsatisfying read.
Boredom is different nowadays. It‘s about super-saturation, distraction, restlessness. I am often bored but it‘s not for lack of options: a thousand TV channels, the bounty of Netflix, countless net radio stations, innumerable unlistened-to albums, unwatched DVDs and unread books... Today‘s boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time.
Seemed fitting to really get into this the same day I blew sixty bucks on vinyl. 🎸🎶📚 #music #popculture #nonfiction
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past | 
