We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, tribute albums and box sets, anniversary festivals and live performances of classic albums: Each new year is better than the previous year for music from yesteryear.
Could it be that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is ... its past?
Maybe that sounds unnecessarily apocalyptic. But the scenario I'm imagining isn't a cataclysm so much as a gradual wind-down. This is the way that pop ends, 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 Pavement album you played to death in your first year in college.
Once upon a time, pop's metabolism buzzed with dynamic energy, creating the surging-into-the-future feel of periods such as the psychedelic '60s, the post-punk '70s, the hip-hop '80s and the rave '90s. The 2000s felt different. The sensation of moving forward grew fainter as the decade unfurled.
If the pulse of now felt weaker with each passing year, that's because in the 2000s, the pop present became ever more crowded out by the past, whether in the form of archived memories of yesteryear or retro-rock leeching off ancient styles. Rather than being about itself, the 2000s were about every other previous decade happening again all at once.
Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first 10 years of the 21st century turned out to be the "Re" Decade. The 2000s were dominated by the "re-" prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, reenactments. Endless retrospection: Every year brought a fresh spate of anniversaries, with their attendant glut of biographies, memoirs, rockumentaries, biopics and commemorative issues of magazines. Then there were the band reformations, whether it was groups reuniting for nostalgia tours to replenish the members' bank balances (Police, Led Zeppelin, Pixies) or as a prequel to returning to the studio to relaunch their recording careers (Stooges, Fleetwood Mac, My Bloody Valentine).
If only it were just the old music and old musicians coming back. But the 2000s was also the decade of rampant recycling: bygone genres revived and renovated, vintage sonic material reprocessed and recombined. Too often with new young bands, beneath their taut skin and rosy cheeks you could detect the sagging, gray flesh of old ideas.
As the 2000s proceeded, the interval between something happening and its being revisited seemed to shrink insidiously. The reissue industry's tentacles have already reached the late '90s, with box sets and remastered/expanded versions of minimal techno, Britpop and even Morrissey's lamest run of solo albums. As for revivals, the music scene mostly abided by the 20-Year Rule of Revivalism: The '80s were in for pretty much the entire 2000s. Then, right on cue, from last year onward you started to see glimpses of '90s revivalism, with the rise of grunge and Britpop as reference points for new bands such as Yuck and Brother.
The word "retro" refers to a self-conscious fetish for period stylization (in music, clothes, design) expressed creatively through pastiche and citation. But retro has come to be used in a more vague way to describe anything that relates to the relatively recent past of popular culture. This includes phenomena such as the vastly increased presence in our lives of old pop culture: from the availability of back-catalog records to YouTube's gigantic collective archive and the massive changes in music consumption engendered by playback devices such as the iPod (often used as a personal "oldies" radio station).
Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, from the Renaissance's veneration of Roman and Greek classicism to the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism. But there has never been a society in history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.
This kind of retromania has become a dominant cultural force to the point where it feels as if we've reached a tipping point. Is nostalgia stopping our culture's ability to surge forward or are we nostalgic precisely because the culture has stopped moving forward?
I'm not alone in feeling perplexed by these developments. Sometimes it's the musicians themselves who voice concern. In 2007, Sufjan Stevens declared: "Rock and roll is a museum piece. . . . There are great rock bands today — I love the White Stripes, I love the Raconteurs. But they're just reenacting an old sentiment. They're channeling the ghosts of that era — the Who, punk rock, the Sex Pistols, whatever. It's been done."
