ABSTRACT
Quite remarkably, the retro phenomenon has yet to be explored from an academic perspective; there is a complete absence of a sustained argument on the ubiquity of retro and nostalgia within contemporary popular music culture. At the present time, Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania (2011) and Mark Fisher’s book Ghosts of My Life (2014) represent perhaps the closest anyone has come to addressing related issues. In their journalistic texts, Reynolds and Fisher both examine the apparent obsession with older popular cultures by contemporary artists. However, there are a number of key differences between their texts and this text: my book represents the first concerted theoretical and empirical academic study on the topic. Furthermore, my text examines the issues of retro and nostalgia culture from the point of view of popular music fans and focuses exclusively on popular music rather than popular culture. This book thus promises to make a truly original contribution to the field of popular music studies dealing with a topic that has surprisingly never been covered before. In doing so, I hope that what follows will be informative and appealing, especially to those readers who may be studying or teaching subjects such as music, cultural
studies, and sociology-subjects in which there has been considerable interest in retro culture, but no text which offers reliable evidence and argument about its significance.
