retromania

The first decade of the 21st Century saw the runaway growth of an industry dedicated to the exploitation of rock's past, encompassing reunion tours, deluxe expanded reissues, rock documentaries and biopics, rock museums, remakes of iconic albums, and even reenactments by artists of famous events in music history. An endless Eighties revival, which reached the mainstream through artists like Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas and La Roux, lasted the entirety of the decade, and has yet to subside even as hipsters are talking up the Nineties as the next big nostalgia wave. Paralleling the West's oil addiction, pop's economy grows ever more dependent on its own history.Earlier epochs had their own obsessions with what had gone before, but never before has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Does this retromania sound the death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own era? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where pop's archival resources have been exhausted?