ABSTRACT
Introduction Popular music was once concerned with all things youthful and futuristic, which makes the current retro and nostalgia buzz all the more curious and worthy of attention. A good place to start in order to highlight the peculiarity of the trend for retro and nostalgia within contemporary popular music culture is to examine the more traditional connection between popular music and youth culture. This involves mapping a very brief history of subcultural and postsubcultural theory using some key texts such as Resistance through Rituals by Hall and Jefferson (1976) and The Post-Subcultures Reader by Muggleton and Weinzierl (2003). The subcultural and postsubcultural perspectives outlined in these texts demonstrate how popular music once defined generations in the mid-to late twentieth century. However, there is arguably no genuinely new youth subcultural style associated with contemporary popular music todayor at least not on the scale of previous trends. One trend that is quite obvious within popular music today, however, is retro culture, along with the attendant intergenerational composition of its audience. Thus, because popular music is no longer the exclusive domain of youth culture, I deem both subcultural and postsubcultural theory inadequate to deal with the complexity of retro culture and popular music in the twenty-first century. I argue that there is a need to dispense with these theories because their exclusive concern for youth culture renders them unable to account for the fact that popular music is no longer the sole preserve of youth and has not been for a very long time.
