Retromania: Crisis of the Progressive Ideal and Pop Music Spectrality

Abstract

Whether in music production (through the widespread use of sampling, mashup and cut-up techniques, through vintage sounds and instruments or the lo-fi design), in listening habits, in institutional frameworks established for pop culture (commemorative events, its integration into museums, etc), in behaviours and fashion styles (the increasing number of ‘retro’ movements), in visual as well as symbolic spheres, pop always refers to its history and increasingly relies on it. With a past being reinvented, remixed, idealised or made ever ‘kitscher’, bygone days have become the raw material for novelty. Sound ghosts — whose presence simultaneously follows an aesthetic, existential, social and commercial logic — increasingly invade the present and make their mark across styles in the way of a memory kaleidoscope whose spectres, like samples of samples, keep multiplying exponentially.