Twenty-first-century pop culture stagnated as artists mined the past rather than the future

Evidence

This surge in retro sounds fueled the earliest complaints that the twenty-first century lacked the creative momentum of the previous one. Artists seemed more energized by mining the past than inventing the future. 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.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 381

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and quotes Reynolds’s coinage retromania as the core diagnosis of the chapter’s thesis.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s task of stating Marx’s thesis and the ‘omnivore monoculture’ concept — this retro-pull is a key mechanism within it. — connects to: Britpop’s 90s dominance suppressed a pluralist future that never materialised — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 101; Perfect digital archivisation kills the evanescence that made media culturally fertile — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 370; Pop’s ability to host counter-cultural experimentation may be historically spent — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1021 (+5 more)