Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds – review

Simon Reynolds established a reputation in the mid-1980s writing about noisy maverick acts such as the Pixies and Public Enemy with a mix of scholarly scrupulousness and fan-boy enthusiasm. Later in the decade he took to the blissful communality offered by the dancefloor, giving rise to his first major work, Energy Flash, a history of rave music. His 2005 book Rip It Up and Start Again – a re-evaluation of post-punk – emerged when acts such as Franz Ferdinand and the Joy Division film Control were reigniting interest in the period. Looking back over the last 25 years you'd be hard pressed to name a music journalist more adept at tracking and defining the zeitgeist.

In Retromania, Reynolds contends that more than ever before we're leeching off the past, especially the recent past. Maybe once it was possible to believe that culture and society have some kind of evolutionary destiny, moving ever onwards to a more exciting future. But now hipsters appear to dream of generations past, matching their post-punk skinny jeans with "must-have" high-street versions of the classic 1984 Frankie Says Relax T-shirts.

In 1989, a club brand called Retro was established, playing already classic dance-music tunes less than three years old. According to Reynolds, it's particularly striking how quickly one of the key elements of rave music – its future shock – was lost. In the mid-90s more evidence of advancing retromania emerged; the widespread and accepted use of remixing, covering and sampling older music, and acclaim for what Reynolds calls "blatantly derivative groups" (he means Oasis, among others), as well as a flood of reissues, revivals, bands reuniting and nostalgia-fest TV shows such as I Love the 70s. There has also been a boom in vintage clothing. As The Mighty Boosh put it: "The future's dead. Retro's the future."

For Reynolds, the ubiquity of the past in pop culture is "a malaise" that militates against distinctive work or originality. The case against nostalgia is easy to make; he makes some not unexpectedly disappointing visits to various music halls of fame and museums, and is let down by a gig by the reformed New York Dolls("one of the saddest spectacles I've ever seen"). He wonders, above all, why the younger generations aren't tearing down what's gone before and making their own culture.

Reynolds writes in a free-flowing, ruminative style. Ideas are picked up and shaken down before he finds a tentative conclusion and an exception to every rule. Indeed, we're barely halfway through the book before he begins to doubt whether retromania is a modern phenomenon; consider the role played by the British blues boom at the very beginnings of British rock. Later he notes the mid-1970s fondness for 1950s chic, exemplified both by the TV series Happy Days and the opening of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's teddy boy-oriented boutique Let it Rock (later called Sex). He concludes that perhaps retro is "a structural feature of pop culture".

It's the mania that's new. In the 60s and 70s, pop culture had less to look back on but also limited access to the past (unless you frequented specialist secondhand record shops, for example). Now access seems almost limitless, particularly via YouTube. Thanks to digital technology, we can lose ourselves in vast amounts of cultural data and collective memory surfing.

Reynolds is a powerful thinker but it's frustrating that his attention is so music-focused. When he discusses Italian Futurist notions of total rejection of the past he concludes: "Maybe forgetting is as essential in culture as it is existentially and emotionally necessary for individuals." There's much promise in a sentence like that, as if he's about to set off on an exploration of wider contexts for his argument, connecting politics, art and psychology with his analysis of pop culture, but instead he retreats to a discussion of quirkily packaged boxed sets and Julian Cope.

As it happens, if there's one thing our culture is good at it's forgetting. Gore Vidal has written about what he dubbed "the United States of Amnesia". In fact we're living in a culture that's both nostalgic and amnesiac, which sounds like a paradox but isn't; retromania's pick-and-mix has a tendency to wrench everything out of its time and place – jettisoning historical meaning (an MC5 T-shirt is just a T-shirt, a sample from a James Brown song is just a noise).

Catching the zeitgeist isn't easy when culture is travelling in different directions. One of the most intriguing current developments is a resurgence of lo-fi art (7in vinyl singles, hand-made fanzines, screenprints and one-offs). This has particular force in fashion, with its rapid turnover and resultant built-in obsolescence. Looked at like this, vintage clothing could be regarded as anti-capitalist. In the closing pages of this absorbing book, Reynolds seems surprised by one of his own conclusions, that nostalgia has a "dissident potential". As the Covent Garden vintage boutique recently exhorted when opening: "Don't follow fashion. Buy something that's already out of date."

Dave Haslam's Not Abba: the Real Story of the 1970s is published by Fourth Estate.