Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

The first book to make sense of 21st Century pop 'Retromania' explores rock's nostalgia industry of revivals reissues reunions and remakes and argues that there has never before been a culture so obsessed with its own immediate past. Pulling together parallel threads from music fashion art and new media Simon Reynolds confronts a central paradox of our era: from iPods to YouTube we're empowered by mind-blowing technology but too often it's used as a time machine or as a tool to shuffle and rearrange music from yesterday. We live in the digital future but we're mesmerized by our analogue past.