In his book ‘Retromania, Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past’ (2011), music journalist Simon Reynolds states that popular (music) culture is suffering from retromania, an incurable addiction to its own past. According to Niels van Poecke, his analysis is based on a nineteenth century—and therefore very modern—notion of ‘authenticity’. It makes himself a symptom …
In a previous post on The New Weird Generation I wrote that artists such as Antony Hegarty, Coco Rosie and Devendra Banhart perceive everyday life as alienating – as too rational, mature, artificial, technological, et cetera – and seek for authenticity by romanticizing the world (to paraphrase Novalis). Consider, for example, their longing for nature …
In the documentary The Eternal Children (see also ‘CocoRosie’), Antony Hegarty, lead singer of the pop ensemble Antony and the Johnsons, perceives the waning of a postmodern sensibility, and the rise of something else.
