Since the term nostalgia first became common currency, no area of life has been associated with it more than popular culture. From Alvin Toffler onward, intellectuals frequently drew on revivals of past styles in music and fashion or used films and television series set in the past as examples to substantiate their claims that nostalgia had become omnipresent.
At the same time, film, music, and fashion critics drew on nostalgia to explain the existence and appeal of pop cultural revivals. The two lines converged in the discussion of the “nostalgia wave” in the 1970s, which, to a large extent, was inspired by a revival of 1950s rock and roll at the time. The 1970s also generated a new term for revivalism with retro.
Originating in France in the debate about la mode rétro, discussed later in this chapter, the word soon entered many other languages. Quickly the two terms, nostalgia and retro, became conflated to the point where they were used almost interchangeably. What Fredric Jameson called the “nostalgia film” drew on examples also discussed as retro, a term he used as well, and the same holds true for Jean Baudrillard.
Simon Reynolds starts out by distinguishing between retro and nostalgia only to end up equating them: for him nostalgia is complicit in—if not responsible for—pop culture’s full-on plunge into “retromania.” By contrast, art historian Elizabeth Guffey, in her overview of the history of retro, calls for differentiating between the two terms because “retro is not nostalgia.”
While both concepts can appear in a positive or neutral way—there is no dearth of radio stations, TV shows, and shops sporting either the word nostalgia or retro in their titles—in intellectual discourse they, and nostalgia most of all, usually carry a negative, pejorative connotation. Similar to the critics of nostalgia discussed in Chapter 1 and the critics of conservatism discussed in Chapter 2, critics of pop culture use the term nostalgia mainly as an indictment.
More specifically they use it, as we will see, first in an emotional sense, implying that people returned to the pop cultural past because of a personal, sentimental attachment; second in an aesthetic sense, synonymous with kitsch; and finally in a temporal sense, to denote an orientation toward the past and an inability or unwillingness to go with the times, forsaking innovation and originality for imitation and repetition.