Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?

Introduction: A Life-Changing Thing

Introduction A Life-Changing Thing I would hark back to, y’know, the birth of rock ’n’ roll . . . ​ and Elvis Presley, an’ you get something that hasn’t happened before, happening. Or perhaps, you get something happening which is, ehm, a generational thing. I think in terms of music there are pivotal times . . . ​ the birth of rock ’n’ roll, punk, hip-hop, rave, for example . . . ​ that so inspire a generation [such] that people are fundamentally changed by this happening . . . ​ but [among] certain people who are susceptible to looking out for, y’know, something new, eh, the actual change in their lives is phenomenal. It dictates in a sense the rest of your life, because . . . ​ the phenomen[on], whatever happens, has such a fundamental effect on you that it actually changes the course of your life. So, whereas it could be if punk never happened or if, y’know, I was ten years older, I would have perhaps missed out, or would have been led down different avenues. But ’cause, y’know, it did feel like, yeah, [punk] was a lifechanging thing . . . ​ an’ I feel very privileged, as I think a lot of my contemporaries were, to [have] be[en] around at the time, when this was happening. (English male punk, aged forty-four) T he beginning of the twenty-first century marks an interesting and highly significant period in contemporary popular music history. Almost every living generation in the Westernized world has grown up in an age during which popular music has been a pivotal element of the global media and cultural industries, be it the advent of rock ’n’ roll during the mid-1950s, the psychedelic and polit­ icized rock of the late 1960s, the punk backlash of the mid-1970s, or the dance music explosion of the late 1980s. The sounds, styles, and cultural impact of each of these popular music eras have been vividly documented in books, magazine articles, motion pictures, and 2 \ Introduction­ television series. Indeed, such accounts of popular music’s impact on youth and the wider society now form part of our general understanding of the cultural changes that swept through Western nations after 1950. Far less well documented, however, are the more long-term effects on those individuals who passed through this “youthquake” (Leech 1973) on their way to adulthood. In 1983, Simon Frith suggested that “the sociology of rock is inseparable from the sociology of youth” (1983: 9). This statement may have been an astute observation at the time but today it appears more problematic. What is missing from Frith’s observation—and something that has come to register ever more critically in the thirty years since it was made—is a sense of what happens to popular music audiences beyond the time of their youth— and whether musical tastes acquired as teenagers actively influence or shape subsequent biographical trajectories. Frith, of course, is not alone in this respect. In most academic and popular accounts of music and youth, the liminality of youth as a life stage and what subsequently becomes of those involved in music-driven youth cultures have never really been primary points for consideration. This book constitutes an attempt to deal precisely with the question of how people move on from youth and effectively grow older with popular music. The book’s starting point examines the notion that the cultural significance of popular music is no longer tied exclusively to youth and, for many people, the music that “mattered” to them in their youth continues to play an important role in their adult lives. Such importance, it is argued, goes well beyond the often cited “nostalgia value” of popular music. Rather than portraying a group of individuals yearning for a return to the days of their youth, I illustrate that aging audiences for popular music often exhibit a dynamic, shifting, and developing quality in their appreciation of music, its relevance to their everyday lives, and its broader sociocultural significance . It is further explained how, for many aging followers of rock, punk, dance, and other contemporary popular music genres, the cultural sensibilities they acquired as members of music-driven youth cultures have remained with them, shaping their life courses and becoming ingrained in their biographical trajectories and associated lifestyle sensibilities. Introduction / 3 The book does not claim that a particular style of music will have the “same” effect on everyone, nor does it maintain that music continues to...