Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?

3 / Toning Down the Mohawk: Music, Style, and Aging

3 / Toning Down the Mohawk Music, Style, and Aging A characteristically defining feature of popular music genres from the 1950s onward has been the stylistic innovations that have grown up around them. Almost every post–Second World War popular music genre, from rock ’n’ roll through hard rock and glam to punk, goth, and hip-hop, has been spectacularly demarcated by the visual style of artists and audiences associated with these musics. The significance of music-based style has been most comprehensively mapped in relation to youth. Beginning with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s (see Hall and Jefferson 1976) and continuing in the post-CCCS work of Hebdige (1979), style as a visual appendage of youth “subcultures” was argued to mark out strategies of resistance to an array of social maladies, from class inequality and unemployment (Jefferson 1976) to social exclusion and racism (Chambers 1976). In the 1990s, a new chapter in the analysis of music-based style began with the emergence of post-subcultural theory. Embracing key tenets of postmodernism while simultaneously employing a Weberian model for the interpretation of social status, post-subcultural theory sought to rethink class-based subcultural explanations of style in the face of the alleged 68 \ Chapter 3 individualization and heightened reflexivity ushered in by a new age of consumer choice and lifestyle marketing (Polhemus 1997; Miles 2000; Muggleton 2000). Up until the early 1980s, the youth-centered credentials of popular music–related styles were relatively easy to qualify in academic writing. Those investing in such styles were primarily “young” people , that is to say, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Over a quarter of a century later, however, the positioning of popular music– related styles as youth centered seems far less productive as an analytical strategy for understanding the significance of these styles as cultural markers of identity. While classic style-based musics such as punk, hard rock, metal, and goth, together with a range of other genres that originated in the 1970s and 1980s, continue to thrive, the scenes now focused on these musics could hardly be described as the exclusive domain of youth; rather, such scenes are essentially multigenerational, their memberships comprising individuals spanning the generations from teenager to fifty- and, in some cases, sixty-­ something. Consequently, reading punk, rock, metal, and so on as “youth” musics is to ignore their wider significance among a postyouth audience. The same applies to the visual styles associated with these musics. If conventional readings of style continue to associate them primarily with youth culture, the fact is that a much broader age cohort now invests in aspects of style and the aesthetic sensibilities ingrained within them. While in many instances the style projects of older fans may be toned-down versions of their earlier youth images, they are, nonetheless, forms of stylistic association and thus warrant analytical attention. The “Post-youth” Meaning of Style One obvious problem here is how to position established theories of style—those that have been applied in the study of youth culture— to individuals now in middle age and, increasingly, approaching later life. For these aging groups of “stylists,” discourses of resistance, subversion , or rebellion, at least as these have conventionally been used to talk about the meaning of youth style, have no straightforward appli- Toning Down the Mohawk / 69 cation.1 This is not to suggest that age strips style of any form of subversive meaning. It is all too easy to glibly dismiss the middle-aged, middle-class biker who takes out her motorcycle each Sunday afternoon for a leisurely tour to a country pub with a rock ’n’ roll jukebox , or the sixty-year-old hippie with his own design company whose­ festival-going activities have dwindled to an annual trip to Glastonbury . Certainly, these aging examples of biker and hippie culture are very different, at least in terms of socioeconomic standing, from the young bikers and hippies interviewed by Willis (1978) during the early 1970s. Similarly, the middle-aged punk going down to his local pub for a game of darts, or picking his young daughter up from school, does not correspond in any obvious sense with the Hebdigian version of the young punk using and abusing his or her body as a means of picking fault with the social system (see Hebdige 1979). Yet the very presence of such aging examples of “youth” cultural...