For the most part, Reynolds focuses on a wide variety of young artists committed to the revival of a diverse range of older aesthetics that they are too young to have experienced the first time around. By “retro,” Reynolds means two distinct trends in popular music that he doesn’t completely distinguish between. In the recent book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, the music critic Simon Reynolds suggests a qualified no - or at least, that within an exhausted culture consistently revitalized by a technological acceleration which increasingly makes everything about the past more accessible, the recurrence of older styles, positions, and movements now severed from an original historical context replaces the possibility of innovation.

Might some contemporary equivalent, no matter how farcical, emerge from the contemporary moment of our Great Recession? This is something of a desperate realization, as that temporal moment led to the eradication of post-war British socialism, the disempowerment of the working-class, the media’s stigmatization of women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities who had achieved some measure of social progress in the prior decade, and the general brutality of Thatcherism one shudders at the possible forms a farcical reiteration of such developments might take in the United States of the near future. Yet 1970s Britain also produced punk rock, a dissident subculture that registered the fragmentation of society and ultimately proved to be a viable means of protest when transplanted elsewhere.

While the comparison is by no means exact, certain elements of the present moment in the United States (such as high unemployment, an unstable currency, a moderate-liberal government that finds it difficult to govern due to legislative stalemate, a nascent rightist populist movement fueled by an occasionally racist nativism and hostility to “big government”) certainly resonate with the history of Britain in the 1970s. If the events of history, as Karl Marx once famously argued, happen first as tragedy and recur as re-enacted farce, the reoccurrence of any number of harbingers of doom typical of the last great global recession of the 1970s should indicate that we are in for hilarious times.

Steve ignorant the rest is propaganda