There’s something in this article that rankles my humbug nature, Up With Grups. Maybe it’s the undignified me-tooism of 40-something music enthusiasts desperate to hold on to their cultural relevance in a world of youth fluff. Let it go. Embrace elderhood and maturity, and maybe even growth.
“All of the really good music right now has absolutely precise parallels to the best music of the eighties, from Franz Ferdinand to Interpol to Death Cab—anything you can name,” says Michael Hirschorn, the 42-year-old executive vice-president of original programming and production at VH1. “Plus, the 20-year-olds are all listening to the Cure and New Order anyway. It’s created a kind of mass confusion. I was at the Coachella festival last year, and the groups people were most stoked about were Gang of Four and New Order.” No wonder Grups like today’s indie music: It sounds exactly like the indie music of their youth. Which, as it happens, is what kids today like, too, which is why today’s new music all sounds like it’s twenty years old. And thus the culture grinds to a halt, in a screech of guitar feedback.
As a result, says Hirschorn, “some of the older parents I know who have teenagers claim that there’s no generation gap anymore. They say they get along perfectly with their kids. They listen to the same music. To me, that seems somewhat laughable. But I do remember when I was young, trying to explain the Beatles to my dad, and he didn’t even know who they were. I don’t think that’s possible today.”
Something about that is sad, like an older woman who dresses in revealing outfits and belly button jewelry. It’s an attitude of denial. Being on the outside and wanting back in.
I think there is something essentially “youthful” about making and enjoying music. That’s an attractive aspect to it. Like many major artistic achievements, great music is most often produced by young people. When we’re young do we live in a mental world of greater artistic feeling? I have this theory that when you’re in that period of adolescence from puberty to your early twenties, your brain is elastic and emotional, having not been fully constructed into a more or less rigid framework of habits and processes. We do know that the adolescent brain is structurally different from adult brains. This accounts for much of the high risk behavior we associate with youth. Maybe this mental state makes music and art more personally impactful and significant than at any other time in your life. Why else do we feel a particular affinity for the music of our youth? I’m just thinking out loud here. Maybe there are no rigid boundaries between young and old, but should we differentiate somehow?
I’ve always appreciated the ceremonies in other cultures that attend the transition into adulthood. Then you have some cultural expectation of behavior. There are rules and guidelines as to what you need to do. In our culture, we no longer have a real concept of what is expected of the individual. It is too ad hoc, too amorphous… for me. At least in a world of rules you have the enjoyment of defying convention and expressing your individuality. But, what happens when expressing your individuality is something everyone does?
I think the association of youth with music is a really recent thing in Western culture. For centuries, music was something that everyone was expected to enjoy and participate in. Now that I think about it, the whole “music is for adolescents” thing really only dates back to the whole phenomenon of marketing for teenagers and the pseudo-oppositional culture of “rebellion” that started in the early rock’n’roll era–basically taking something “shocking” that your parents are supposed to disapprove of and commodifying / marketing it to young people as some kind of ready-made identity. Which of course didn’t last that long before getting undermined by aging baby boomers. The whole “this is not your father’s Oldsmobile” ad campaign comes to mind. Anyways, prior to that, sure, people might have associated excessive preoccupation with music with youth, but music wasn’t constructed as this thing supposedly made by and for the under-30 set.
Personally, I don’t think I appreciate music any less now that I’m older than I did when I was a teenager. Back then there was still so much to learn about it that it was extra exciting, and I have gotten a little jaded in some ways. But my knowledge of music and the experiences I’ve had also make my current experience of music richer, which is a totally ok trade-off in my book.
The thing that bugs me about that grups article is the totally unexamined class privilege aspect. It’s all about these people with fancy jobs pulling in a way bigger salary than the average person, who live in New York City and places like that. But they take all these generalizations from them like “the generation gap is closing” and stuff. Maybe in these certain groups, with certain interests who make certain amounts of money and are all white. But is that really true elsewhere?