Startled to be reminded just how long now - and how far back - I have been gnashing my teeth about retro-paralysis!
And in fact there's a riff using the "re" that I would later use in Retromania - not recycling, though, I don't think - it just re-occurred to me.
(And in fact someone else got there earlier, which I didn't know in 1990, or in 2010).
(I guess reinventing the wheel would be no small achievement, if you never even saw a wheel in the first place).
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I know I harp on about this, but the parallels between late 20th Century pop culture nostalgia and WW2 nostalgia are eerily similar. There are WW2-focused magazines like "Britain At War" that have exactly the same kind of cover layouts as Mojo - you just get Monty instead of Bowie.
It seems to be a general harking back to the exciting-but-perilous maelstrom of the second half of the 20th Century, and the big figures of that era. It's possibly a product of the media of that time, that tended towards amplification and aggrandisement, whereas contemporary media seems to have the opposite inclination, a tendency towards debunking and belittling.
I've noticed, recently, that when you visit old-school record shops, now, you tend to see a surprising number of teenage girls.
When I was at school, 25 years ago. There were only really four of us in a class, who were into old music, but all of four of us were boys. Even the girls with the hippest taste would largely favour hip music that was contemporary.
Well ,times change. Just recently, I saw three girls, who didn't look much older than 16/17, coming out of my most local record shop with a copy of Black Sabbath 4, and really seeming glad to own it. Bear in mind, old rock music is now even older. That is an LP that might have been released even before their parents were born. When you look at it in those terms, a record made fifty years ago. It would be the equivalent of one of my peers buying a Glenn Miller record.
Can I point out a double irony, here? Reading this piece, I get nostalgic for the still-thriving rock press of the early nineties,
where three fairly similar monthlies could get a decent share of sales.
I always deny ever having read Q, but I'm kidding myself. I could always get hold of a copy, and it was a guilty pleasure.
It was just so sumptuously glossy and grown-up. It's like when I find myself reading the Telegraph or The Times -
Yes, I know this is the Tory press, but it feels like a proper newspaper.
Vox always had a poor relation vibe similar to Record Mirror - The kind of magazine that would feature the lead singer from
The Spin Doctors on the cover, because all the real rock stars were too busy to talk to them.
Select found it's niche with Britpop. Indeed, the original article, written by Stuart Maconie, identifying Britpop as a rising trend appeared on it's pages in the spring of 1993. After that, it loosened up and became the closest thing we ever had to an indie Smash Hits. The problem was that it became so closely associated with the prevailing wind that it struggled once the wind changed.
As a side-note. I remember around 1997-98, Select ran an issue that listed the 100 Most Important People In Music, at that moment, and Beck (Beck Hansen) came top. This is something that struck me, the other day, when I was looking at your history of anti-theatricality in rock. Beck's reputation never really recovered from that dissing in The New Radicals' song, did it? Long-term, he's carved a respectable and commercially solid career, but he's not really viewed as a major figure, even though, there was that brief moment, in the late nineties, when he was hailed as a pathfinder in the lineage of Dylan/Bowie/Prince. It now seems hard to fathom.
"Those of you who thought rock'n'roll was all about the exhilaration of living in the present tense, about cutting loose from the ties of the past and burning up like there's no tomorrow..."
That's the biggest tell this was written in the 90s. No danger of any of your readers thinking that now! The last two words were on the money.
One crucial commonality between rock'n'roll and WW2 nostalgia is that they both appeal to people who still read printed media. I have no idea what the statistics show, but I would be amazed if a single person under 40 buys a printed copy of Mojo, or of Britain at War.
My take on the cult of WW2 is that people are nostalgic not for the war itself - most of them don't remember it - but for the mythology of the war that was everywhere in movies, TV shows and comics in Britain in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Which of course is also almost exactly the Age of Rock.
When I interviewed the guy behind BBC 4's music docs, all those ____ Britannia docs (Prog, Synth, Soul etc), he made this same analogy - we didn't have a heroic unifying galvanizing purpose-giving moment to look back to like the WW2 generation, the closest we had was Rock.
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