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Popular Music and Retro Culture in the Digital Era This book explores the trend of retro and nostalgia within contemporary popular music culture. Using empirical evidence obtained from a case study of fans’ engagement with older music, the book argues that retro culture is the result of an inseparable mix of cultural and technological changes, namely, the rise of a new generation and cultural mood along with the encouragement of new technologies. Retro culture has become a hot topic in recent years, but this is the first time the subject has been explored from an academic perspective and from the fans’ perspective. As such, this book promises to provide concrete answers about why retro culture dominates in contemporary society. F or the first time ever, this book provides an empirically grounded theory of popular music, retro culture and its intergenerational audience in the twenty- first century. 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Reid 186 Popular Music and Retro Culture in the Digital Era Jean Hogarty Popular Music and Retro Culture in the Digital Era Jean Hogarty First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Jean Hogarty to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hogarty, Jean. Title: Popular music and retro culture in the digital era / Jean Hogarty. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge advances in sociology Identifiers: LCCN 2016007983 | ISBN 9781138676701 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315559926 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Retro (Style) in popular music. | Popular music—Social aspects. | Popular music—History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML3918.P63 H63 2017 | DDC 306.4/8424—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007983 ISBN: 978-1-138-67670-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-55992-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 There Is No Now: Welcome to the Age of Retro Culture 1 2 Popular Music, Youth and Aging 8 3 Retro Culture in the Digital Era 32 4 Generation Units of Retro Fans 52 5 The Hauntological Structure of Feeling 80 6 Technological Determinism and Retro Culture 103 7 Back to the Future 132 Index 139 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments It is with great pleasure that I acknowledge the support of a number of people in the production of this work. In 2008 I approached Dr. Colin Coulter with some rather sketchy ideas about my ambition to pursue doctoral research on something music related. By 2010 I had registered to undertake the research officially and with Colin at the helm as the primary supervisor. Colin took a keen interest in my project, and the discussions and debates we had were a huge source of inspiration to me. This book is in part informed by my doctoral thesis and, as such, I wish to single out particular thanks to Colin for his unwavering support of me and of my work. I would also like to thank my second supervisor, Dr. Aphra Kerr, for her support throughout my doctoral research and my external examiner, Dr. Jason Toynbee, for helping to prepare this book for publication. I interviewed forty music fans for this project, and I am forever grateful to all of them for their time and consideration and for sharing their stories with me. C hapter 6 was developed partially from a previous publication of mine, which is listed in the bibliography. Material from this publication was reproduced with kind permission by Routledge and R ock Music Studies . I would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their positive feedback and enthusiasm: Dr. Thomas M. Kitts and Prof. Gary Burns at Rock Music Studies . I thank all at Routledge for giving me a chance by publishing this book. I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to the commissioning editors Max Novick and Emily Briggs for being so positive and enthusiastic about this book right from the start. A big thank you also to the senior editor, Jennifer Morrow, for being so efficient and professional to deal with right throughout the process. Thank you also to the two anonymous reviewers who deigned my work worthwhile. I reserve for last those for whom my gratitude is on another level of mag- nitude. This book would not have been possible without the generosity of my friends, Vivienne, Ciaran, and Marianna—my best friend since school, who stuck by their often-absent friend over the years. I owe a very special thank you to the unprefixed and unsuffixed David Bowie for soundtracking yet another fantastic voyage. Finally, I wish to express profound thanks to my extended family and my immediate family: to my brother Mark and his partner Maria, my cat Boo, my dog Louis and, above everyone, to my parents Mary and James. Finally, thank y ou for reading. This page intentionally left blank 1 There Is No Now Welcome to the Age of Retro Culture “It doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century,” laments Mark Fisher (2014), and he has a point: it’s the second decade of the twenty-first century, and Roger Waters is rebuilding his Wall, and The Who are talking about their (re)generation, and Mick Jagger and company still can’t get no satisfaction. And it’s not just the aging rockers of the twentieth century who engage in nostalgia events, but also boy bands such as Take That and rap groups such as N.W.A., who in 2015 released their biopic S traight Outta Compton . “Straight outta original ideas,” mocked the memes (Griggs 2015), and who could disagree? The spate of retrospective events serves as just one example of how the culture of retro and nostalgia holds sway over popular music in recent years; the preoccupation with the past is evinced more broadly in the trend of anniversary edition albums, the vinyl revival, the resurrection of dead pop stars in the form of holograms, and the presence of young artists mimicking old styles of music, with Imelda May invoking the 1950s rockabilly style and sound, and Bruno Mars and The Hooligans hark back to the 1970s heyday of Earth, Wind, and Fire. This book explores and explains why this trend of retro culture is so pervasive and popular in the twenty-first century. Q uite remarkably, the retro phenomenon has yet to be explored from an academic perspective; there is a complete absence of a sustained argument on the ubiquity of retro and nostalgia within contemporary popular music culture. At the present time, Simon Reynolds’ book R etromania (2011) and Mark Fisher’s book G hosts of My Life (2014) represent perhaps the closest anyone has come to addressing related issues. In their journalistic texts, Reynolds and Fisher both examine the apparent obsession with older popular cultures by contemporary artists. However, there are a number of key differences between their texts and this text: my book represents the first concerted theoretical and empirical academic study on the topic. Furthermore, my text examines the issues of retro and nostalgia culture from the point of view of popular music fans and focuses exclusively on popular music rather than popular culture. This book thus promises to make a truly original contribution to the field of popular music studies dealing with a topic that has surprisingly never been covered before. In doing so, I hope that what follows will be informative and appealing, especially to those readers who may be studying or teaching subjects such as music, cultural