{"id":1518,"date":"2011-08-04T00:34:56","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T06:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1518"},"modified":"2011-08-04T00:34:56","modified_gmt":"2011-08-04T06:34:56","slug":"yesterday_in_to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1518","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday in Today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The New Republic<\/em> is running my review of Simon Reynolds&#8217;s new book, <em>Retromania: Pop Culture&#8217;s Addiction to Its Own Past.<\/em> It (the review) begins like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cWho wants yesterday\u2019s papers?\u201d sang Mick Jagger in 1967. \u201cWho wants yesterday\u2019s girl?\u201d The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: \u201cNobody in the world.\u201d That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday\u2019s papers and carry on with yesterday\u2019s girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past \u2014 with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button.<\/p>\n<p>Nowhere is the past\u2019s grip so tight as in the world of music, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds meticulously documents in <em>Retromania<\/em>. Over the last two decades, he argues, the \u201cexploratory impulse\u201d that once powered pop music forward has shifted its focus from Now to Then. Fans and musicians alike have turned into archeologists. The evidence is everywhere. There are the reunion tours and the reissues, the box sets and the tribute albums. There are the R&#038;B museums, the rock halls of fame, the punk libraries. There are the collectors of vinyl and cassettes and \u2014 God help us \u2014 eight-tracks. There are the remixes, the mash-ups, the samples. There are the \u201ccurated\u201d playlists. When pop shakes its moneymaker today, what rises is the dust of the archive. &#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tnr.com\/book\/review\/retromania-simon-reynolds\">Read on<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New Republic is running my review of Simon Reynolds&#8217;s new book, Retromania: Pop Culture&#8217;s Addiction to Its Own Past. It (the review) begins like this: \u201cWho wants yesterday\u2019s papers?\u201d sang Mick Jagger in 1967. \u201cWho wants yesterday\u2019s girl?\u201d The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: \u201cNobody in the world.\u201d That was then. Now [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}