Nuovo, vecchio e soprattutto di nuovo. Riprese, persistenze e presenze nella popular music degli anni Duemila

The essay focuses on the propensity for the past that has been at the heart of the mainstream discourses around popular music during the 2000s and afterwards. After having distinguished between what we may call archimusicality (the systemic usage of “past music” to generate “new one”, e.g., writing a song according to the rules of a given genre) and the recovery of music (e.g., the revival of a “forgotten” trend), the essay addresses the so–called retromania (“pop culture’s addiction to its own past”, according to Simon Reynolds). Such phenomenon seems to accompany the wider nostalgicification witnessed byWestern culture (we increasingly become nostalgic about a more and more recent past) and to be featured by both traditional and innovative ways of musical representification (according to Edmund Husserl’s terminology; taking something from the past back to the present). Stylistic revival (e.g., folk revival), a traditional and often genuinely nostalgic way, may be defined as ontological. Celebrations (e.g., reissues) and coming backs (reunions), from the one side (being paramusical strategies), and the usage of lyrics (singing about the past), of intertextual elements (making reference to pre–existing pieces ofmusic), and the instalment of different sonic levels (“inside” and “out”, “here” and “there”, “now” and “then” etc.), on the other side (being enunciational means that thematize the past), stand as innovative ways. So–called hauntology (a trend within experimental popular music; from the neologism hantologie coined by Jacques Derrida, identifying the phantasmal presence of the past into the present) employs such thematization, and in particular the usage of different sonic levels, establishing what we may call a phenomenogical revival (and a critical nostalgia).