'A Nugget If You Dug It!': Music Revivalism, Retro-nostalgia, and the Transnational Garage Rock Scene

Abstract

The tendency to think of pop culture as moving along a linear trajectory of novelty and innovation masks a more complicated cultural logic at work in the case of popular music, where past musics either persist at the fringes of the pop culture landscape, or disappear only to reappear years later as “revivals”. In the case of rock music, in particular, the lateral expansion of underground music into a vast terrain of local scenes has enabled past musics to live on as niche cultures, sustained by fans who peddle in the memorabilia, ephemera, and vintage goods of bygone days. Recent scholarship on music revivalism, however, has largely overlooked popular music revivals, instead tending to limit the study of revival phenomena to folk, heritage, and traditional musics. In this paper, I ask, how do the parameters of revivalism change when discussing popular music revivals? How do popular musics complicate the well-worn models of revivalism, which are so grounded in notions of tradition and heritage? This paper explores these questions by drawing on the example of garage rock, a genre of popular music rooted in the sound and style of 1960s rock and roll. Garage rock began in the 1970s in the United States within niche communities of record collectors and critics who sought to revive obscure, amateur rock and roll music of the mid-1960s. Today garage rock continues to flourish as a particular niche in underground rock, with thriving scenes in such urban centres as New York, London, and Tokyo. In this paper, I seek to highlight the particular modes of retro-nostalgia that undergird garage culture. I argue that the role of retro-nostalgia in pop culture more generally challenges us to rethink the concept of revivalism as an analytic tool in music scholarship.