UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation argues that the pervasiveness of retro in today’s popular music culture is part of a larger story about transformations not just in the music industry, but in global capitalism. I take up the broad usage of the retro concept developed in the 2000s by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, for whom retro not only describes musical revivals and new acts committed to period stylization; retro designates a larger cultural situation where pop music’s very recent past looms ever-greater over its present. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concept of the nostalgia mode and his approach to periodization, they concluded that retro indexes cultural exhaustion and music’s severance from historicity, if not the “end of history” itself. By contrast, I argue that retro is less about historical closure than a new way of relating to music as history. Across three case studies of retro, I demonstrate why we are listening to more “old” music than ever before and how the reactivation of music history can further different cultural and political ends. In a history of rock radio that culminates in the Classic Rock format, I show how the emergence of nostalgia formatting heralded a new era for rock’s self-commemoration. While the music industry canonizes the past in order to resell it, distorting our sense of history in the process, I show how musical revivals “from below” can use music history toward resistant ends. Rather than simply trying to repeat the past, I argue that revivals carry history into the present. In an analysis of the 1980s boogie-funk revival known as the modern funk scene, I show how bygone music genres can serve as sites of cultural recovery, continuity, and community building. Though grassroots musical revivals have contributed to a growing interest in music history, the biggest contributor to today’s listening habits derives from the growth and popularity of streaming platforms. As I show in a case study of Spotify, financialization has transformed the music industry in ways that bias our listening toward older catalog titles. A materialist account of retro therefore provides a history of the present.