Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Retro-styled groups had generally been a niche market, for people unhealthily obsessed with a bygone past. But now these heavily indebted bands [such as] The Stone Roses, Oasis, [and] The White Stripes, could become “central.” In the 2000s the pop present became ever more crowded out by the past, [with] bygone genres revived and renovated, vintage sonic material reprocessed and recombined. There has never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Reynolds documents how the new pop musical stars of the twenty-first century, even the best artists among them, continue doing cover versions, de facto when not literally, of soul and rock from the 1960s, punk and rap and synth pop from the ’70s and ’80s. “Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward,” he asks, “or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?” I’m pretty sure it’s both, as it tends to be with big, diffuse causes and effects.