Joining me remotely from a house in Pasadena, California, not far from the then ongoing LA fires (his family’s bags are packed and ready), Simon Reynolds asks me if I’ve seen “that new Musk car that looks like a giant block of geometric planes.” He describes it with both awe and disgust. “It’s a car, like an ordinary person’s car, but it looks like a tank, and it’s very, very harshly angled. They all look horrible to me; it’s like some kitsch pastiche of a car from the future — but it is a car from the future.”

I had just asked him about the long tradition of politically regressive, aesthetically progressive art, beginning with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, with its love for cars and guns and noise, its passionate misogyny and militarism. This thread, where aesthetics and politics don’t so much meet as move in apparently conflicting directions, has run through four decades of Reynolds’s writings on music and is especially clear in his new collection, Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today.

Reynolds’s first book, 1990’s Blissed Out, combined a love for extreme music and a left-liberal’s discomfort with the ideas behind it, thrown together with rapid-fire conceptual coinages and neologisms (some aging better than others, like calling mid-1980s Def Jam hip-hop a “DISS-TOPIA”). The Sex Revolts, a 1995 collaboration with his wife, critic Joy Press, explored the apparent paradox of incredibly exciting, forward-thinking, liberating sound — the Rolling Stones, Iggy and the Stooges — being powered by the most primeval misogyny. Two histories, 1998’s Energy Flash, on house and techno, and 2005’s Rip It Up and Start Again, on post-punk, revealed a more utopian edge to his writing. But it was Retromania, published in 2010, that lamented the foreclosure of both sonic and political change in the twenty-first century.