Adina Glickstein: I thought it’d be fitting to kick things off by asking you to reflect a bit on Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. What inspired you to write that book in 2011?

Simon Reynolds: I didn’t come up with the word “retromania.” It was something floating around and seemed like a good snappy word to describe a bunch of discrete phenomena that were all linked in terms of being archival, recycling culture, reenacting, and reissuing. All these phenomena converged to create a cultural landscape that seemed very depressing to me at that point. But it also has the word “mania” in it, which hints at a kind of excitement as well.

I was literally addicted to downloading music; there was a whole blog culture of people sharing obscure albums, and to this day, I have thousands and thousands of albums I’ve never listened to. You get frenzied, rabbit-holing on the internet. YouTube had only just started, but the bulk of stuff was old documentaries and TV programs that I never saw the first time around. I could feel myself getting lost in this labyrinth of old stuff, much of which was fascinating, and genuinely worth looking at, but you could feel yourself being pulled away from the present.

And I was middle-aged. And at that age, you start being prone to nostalgia. I don’t really think of nostalgia as a negative in itself. It’s an inevitable part of the human condition. Even when I was a child, I remember being nostalgic for when I was younger. And as you get older, unless your life has been one of unremitting misery, you usually have several little golden ages to look back to ...

— Simon Reynolds’s conversation with Adina Glickstein is printed in full in our Fall 2025 issue, Spike #85 – Nostalgia. Get your copy at a discount by subscribing to one year of the magazine —