The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music

The American musical landscape is dominated by crowd-pleasing oldies that stifle new music and fuel a permanent state of cultural nostalgia, according to this impassioned manifesto. Journalist Rowell (Wherever the Sound Takes You) paints a portrait of pop and rock recording industries where sales of new songs have dwindled, charts are clogged with reissues of legacy material, and touring is dominated by tribute bands. As a result, new musicians are often prevented from entering the limelight, and—when they do—from becoming part of the canon. Rowell traces the roots of this stagnation to a raft of technological and commercial developments, including Spotify algorithms that ply listeners with music they already know. He also argues that the internet’s nostalgic preoccupation with “life as it once was... lulls us into a perpetual state of look[ing] back,” raising questions of what culture values and what it loses at the expense of an obsession with the past. Readers will be captivated by Rowell’s fine-grained music criticism and sharp analysis of the culture industry, rendered in evocative prose (the crowd at a Journey concert “didn’t sing ‘Born and raised in South Detroit’ like it was a lyric... but screamed it the way you might scream to a firefighter that your baby is still in your burning house”). The result is a provocative and entertaining critique of the music industry. (Nov.)