Originally published: Great Britain : Faber and Faber Ltd., 2011

The 're' decade ; The retroscape -- Don't look back : nostalgia and retro -- 'Now.' Pop will repeat itself : museums, reunions, rock docs, re-enactments ; Total recall : music and memory in the time of YouTube ; Lost in the shuffle : record collecting and the twilight of music as an object ; Good citations : the rise of the rock curator ; Turning Japanese : the empire of retro and the hipster international -- 'Then.' Strange changes : fashion, retro and vintage ; Turn back time : revival cults and time-warp tribes ; No future : punk's reactionary roots and retro aftermath ; Rock on (and on) (and on) : the never-ending Fifties revival -- 'Tomorrow.' Ghosts of futures past : sampling, hauntology, and mash-ups ; Out of space : nostalgia for giant steps and final frontiers ; The retroscape (slight return) ; The shock of the old : past, present, and future in the first decade of the Twenty-first century

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration, band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups. But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?