Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?

1 / Popular Music and the Aging Audience

1 / Popular Music and the Aging Audience I n June 1996, when veteran U.K. punk rockers the Sex Pistols performed their twentieth-anniversary reunion concert at London’s Finsbury Park, early into the band’s set lead singer John Lydon (alias Johnny Rotten) is reputed to have said to the audience, “Forty, fat, and back!”1 Offered as a self-mocking remark by Lydon on the aging profile of the Sex Pistols, this comment was also a timely reflection on the longevity of punk and its aging fan base. Along with the younger fans who were there to see a punk legend for the first—and possibly last—time, there were also many “older” punks, people in their forties and fifties who were first drawn to punk during their late teens or early twenties and have remained followers of the music ever since. Lydon is not alone in drawing attention to the aging demographic of rock performers and their audiences in this way. During a February 2005 concert at the Thebarton Theatre in Adelaide, South Australia, stalwart female rocker Suzi Quatro, now in her mid-fifties, remarked that it was her twenty-first Australian tour and, following expressions of surprise and adulation from the audience, exclaimed, 1. As reported to me by a Sex Pistols fan who was present at the event. 14 \ Chapter 1 “Yeah, we grew up together, right?”2 Again, Quatro’s comments are significant in that they acknowledge the continuing importance of popular music for people well into middle age and beyond. And yet, for all the anecdotal evidence that aging popular music fans continue to take their music, and themselves, very seriously, little attempt has been made, in academic writing or elsewhere, to engage with the phenomenon of the aging popular music audience. When aging music fans are written about, more often than not it is in a negative or tongue-in-cheek way, in which they are referred to as has-beens, overgrown teenagers, and the like. As this chapter illustrates, however , such accounts are increasingly out of step with a world in which definitions of aging and generational boundaries are radically shifting . Where once rigid social divisions were drawn between adolescence , early adulthood, middle age, and later life, in late modernity such divisions are much less evident as the lifestyles of people at each of these stages of life become more similar. A further problem with popular representations of aging music audiences is the tendency to equate middle-aged music fandom with a nostalgic harking back to the time of one’s youth. Again, however, it could be argued that such representations are both essentialist and overly simplistic. Although nostalgia may be one contributing factor to a continuing personal investment in popular music in middle age and beyond, arguably it is by no means the only factor. Indeed, as this book endeavors to illustrate, many aging popular music fans live very much in the present, music having informed their biographies in ways that significantly shape current and ongoing aspects of their everyday lives. The key purpose of this chapter, then, is to contextualize the aging popular music audience in late modernity and to begin sketching out the ways in which popular music informs issues of aging, lifestyle, and biography in a late modern context. In the first instance, however, it is useful to consider, and to begin deconstructing, some of the dominant representations of aging music fans that abound in the popular media and are occasionally found in academically informed writing. 2. Drawn from my own field notes made while attending this concert. Popular Music and the Aging Audience / 15 Aging Rockers! Popular Stereotypes of Aging Music Audiences There are numerous stereotypes describing popular music fans in middle age and beyond, “old hippie” and “aging rocker” being two of the most widely used. The media in particular appear to revel in the use of such stereotypes . Represented as typically male and hopelessly immature, the aging music fan is often portrayed by the media as a cultural misfit— a dysfunctional, middle-aged individual longing for a return to the days of his youth. Such a sentiment is clear in the following review of a concert performed by enduring hard rock band AC/DC at London’s Hammersmith Apollo: When the house lights finally dimmed the cheers almost gave the venue an unwanted extension as grown men transformed into the teenagers they...