13 Facts About Simon Reynolds

Simon Reynolds was born on 19 June 1963 and is an English music journalist and author who began his career at Melody Maker in the mid-1980s.

Simon Reynolds subsequently worked as a freelancer and published a number of books on music and popular culture.

Simon Reynolds was born in London in 1963 and grew up in Berkhamsted.

In 1990, Simon Reynolds left the staff of Melody Maker and became a freelance writer, splitting his time between London and New York.

In late 1994, Simon Reynolds moved to the East Village in Manhattan.

In 1998 Simon Reynolds became a senior editor at Spin magazine in the US.

In 2007, Simon Reynolds published Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop in the UK, a collection of his writing themed around the relationship between white bohemian rock and black street music.

In 2011, Simon Reynolds published Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, a critical investigation into what he perceives as the current situation of chronic retrogression in pop music, with a focus on the effects of the internet and digital culture on music consumption and musical creativity.

Early in his career, Simon Reynolds often made use of critical theory and philosophy in his analysis of music, deriving particular influence from thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Simon Reynolds has on occasion used the Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and false consciousness to describe attitudes prevalent in hip hop music.

In discussing the relationship between class and music, Simon Reynolds coined the term liminal class, defined as the upper-working class and lower-middle-class, a group he credits with "a lot of music energy".

Simon Reynolds has written about drug culture and its relationship to various musical developments and movements.

Since 2011, when The Wire renamed its year-end poll from Records of the Year to Releases of the Year, Simon Reynolds has cast several votes for songs rather than album-length releases.