Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?

2 / Individual and Collective Lifestyles of Aging Popular Music Audiences

2 / Individual and Collective Lifestyles of Aging Popular Music Audiences C hapter 1 began the task of mapping the social and cultural terrains of the aging baby-boomer and post-boomer generations in the context of late modernity. In this chapter, I discuss the aging music audiences themselves—or, more specifically, their role as active agents, reflexively producing their aging identities through everyday engagement with popular music and its attendant cultural resources. Key to this analysis is the concept of lifestyle, a term associated in a contemporary sense with the cultural turn in sociology (Chaney 1994) and cognate disciplines concerned with the study of culture. As briefly outlined in Chapter 1, integral to the cultural turn is a reinterpretation of culture not purely as a product of socioeconomic forces, but rather as a reflexive process encapsulating elements of such forces. Such a view considers the significance of the cultural product within a framework of lifestyle projects constructed by active agents through everyday practices of cultural consumption (Chaney 1996; Bennett 2005). Early forays into the field of cultural consumption as a reflexive process inscribed it with a rhetoric of resistance and opposition to a dominant mainstream culture (see, for example , Fiske 1989). Subsequent work, however, has been more invested in the idea of plotting cultural consumption not merely as a space for Individual and Collective Lifestyles / 43 directly oppositional practices and strategies but rather as a resource for increasingly rich and diverse articulations of identity within a cultural context that is seen as becoming more pluralistic and fragmented (Chaney 2002). Building on the contextual frames of reference introduced in Chapter 1, this chapter considers how we might begin to interpret the relationship between popular music, aging, and identity by invoking questions of “value,” “authenticity,” and “transcendence” as these coalesce around individual and collective lifestyle practices. Again, some measure of qualification is necessary here. The analysis presented in this chapter can, by its very nature, only be extended to those social contexts in which media and cultural consumption have provided a basis for everyday experience and identity formation and practice during the period under investigation—the early 1950s through to the present day. No claims are made in this chapter, or in the subsequent empirical chapters that form Part II of this book, as to how popular music acts as a cultural resource outside Western social settings. There is clearly a need for work that investigates the relationship between popular music and aging in non-Western social and cultural contexts. This investigation, however, is not the aim of this book and is well beyond its scope. Popular Music, Identity, and Aging This chapter addresses the critical question of what specifically makes popular music worthy of sustained attention in relation to issues of aging, identity, and lifestyle. Music is, after all, but one form of popular culture produced and consumed in the context of late modernity. Indeed, and as has already been noted in Chapter 1, film, television, and literature also command their own aging audiences; as such, the industries associated with each of these forms of entertainment have advanced considerably toward creating products that cater specifically to older consumers (see Blaikie 1999). Ostensibly then, one could just as easily write about film, television, literature, or a range of other popular cultural products and their impact on the lifestyles and identities of aging individuals. That said, however, in terms of the manner in which it is received and appropriated, music is arguably different 44 \ Chapter 2 from other forms of popular culture in significant ways, not the least of which is in relation to the highly personal connections that individuals form with particular popular music texts and artists. Studies focusing on issues of aesthetics, taste, and textual ownership regarding popular music have been quick to point out the specific kind of relationship that exists between popular music and the audience as compared with other popular cultural forms. A pertinent example here is the work of Frith, which argues that there is something specific to musical experience, namely, its direct emotional intensity. Because of its qualities of abstractness (which “serious” aestheticians have always stressed) music is an individualizing form. We absorb songs into our own lives and rhythms into our own bodies; they have a looseness of reference that makes them immediately accessible. Pop songs are open to appropriation for personal use in a way that other popular cultural forms (television soap...