Contemporary pop lacks forward momentum because the present is crowded out by the past

Evidence

In 2010, music critic Simon Reynolds labeled this phenomenon retromania: “The sensation of moving forward grew fainter as the [aughts] unfurled. Time itself seemed to become sluggish, like a river that starts to meander and form oxbow lakes. If the pulse of NOW felt weaker with each passing year, that’s because in the 2000s the pop present became ever more crowded out by the past, whether in the form of archived memories of yesteryear or retro-rock leeching off ancient styles.” As the 2010s progressed, this stagnation deepened. Nothing sounded especially groundbreaking or urgent. Genre blending gave hip-hop a burst of innovation in the early 2000s, but a decade later, many mainstream songs continued to pull from an industry template: Swedish pop production, alt-rock melodies, and seventies grooves. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 381

Categorization

• XREF: Reynolds’s retromania complements the book’s omnivore-monoculture thesis: everyone consuming retro pastiche is the musical face of flattened, historyless taste. — connects to: North continues an electronic-pop mode that stalled prematurely in the mid-1980s — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 447; Contemporary pop’s return to modernism may overcome the postmodernism it recycles — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 983; Mainstream rock music now insulates listeners from the present rather than registering its tensions. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1295 (+1 more)