Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?
and
Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity
University of Technology Sydney (Australia)
Popular music studies has long been associated, if not synonymous, with youth culture. The development of a space for ageing in popular music studies shows that our field is maturing finally (pun intended). However, these two books still use youth as a reference point, with Bennett launching his monograph with the problem of finding a way “to deal precisely with the question of how people move on from youth and effectively grow older with popular music” (2), arguing the need to look beyond the youth/popular music binary expectation. Notably, the title of the edited collection Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity also clearly still centres on ‘youth’ as something of a default age identity for musical engagement—with ageing being relative to an apparently stable marker of a universal sense of ‘youth’. The introduction to the volume also introduces notions of diverse age engagement in terms of expanding notions of “youthfulness” (an idea that encompasses an attitude rather than an age) and “adulthood” (a term that suggests a certain degree of autonomy and independence) (2–3). Interestingly, the term “post-youth” also appears (25), again a way to describe something that is essentially other than ‘youth’, but is still dominated by the idea of popular music and youth necessarily being tied.
Both works make valuable contributions to the field of popular music studies and beyond, challenging the implication that listeners and participants simply stop being part of the field once they reach a certain age. In his monograph, Bennett’s emphasis on the link between popular music and concepts of youth expands debates about the utility of age as a discourse. It’s an idea that’s developed further with the focus on individual and collective lifestyles of baby boomer and post-baby boomer audiences in Chapter Two (42–63). The idea is that these audiences are continuing a connection to popular music that was established when they were younger, mapping “everyday processes through which popular music retains significance for aging audiences” (62). The implication remains, though, that the association is with the same music or musicians rather than with new ones as the audiences progress—an interesting note in itself (are these audiences simply not wanting to engage with new sounds? Do they feel that doing so might replace the older ones? Do they not feel that the ‘new’ sounds represent their relatively ‘old’ experiences?). The chapters that follow develop this in more depth with ethnographic accounts of specific audience members—again important work given how little evidence currently exists of audiences in this area—but still leaving more questions to be answered. For example, in the chapter on career, discussion about the local punk scene in Adelaide covers the continuing participation of interviewees, but doesn’t go into more detail about how “older punks” exist in a broader musical context (100–1). That is, are they inspiring new artists to come onto the scene (irrespective of age)? Or, is the scene one for those who were ‘there in the day’ and want to continue to extend that day? Discussion of broadcasting and other popular music suggests a broader engagement (102–3), and these gaps aren’t necessarily weaknesses of the study, but rather show how rich the vein of inquiry is, and how much more there is to explore.
The Ageing and Youth Cultures edited volume provides more scope to explore different identities, with notable (and ground-breaking) additions like Taylor’s work on queer audiences, Fogarty’s work on genre beyond rock/pop and Bennett’s work on dance scenes. The section focused on the realities of ageing on practice and engagement also provides insightful coverage of the field (Gibson; Tsitsos; Davis). The collection overall provides many useful case studies (particularly for teaching), while also fitting across different disciplines (cultural studies, gender studies, popular music studies, audience and participation). Again, the emphasis is on what Bennett and Hodkinson proclaim is now “a new ‘post-youth’ cultural territory that is expanding rapidly to encompass a range of lifestyle and aesthetic sensibilities through which ageing individuals retain tangible cultural connections to tastes and affiliations acquired during their teens and early twenties” (6). The inclusion of dance music and its ageing audience is one that is yet to be explored in other works so far, particularly given association with other subcultures including relatively new drug and dance cultures—this section is not about cautionary (or regretful) experiences, but instead treats the music and these scenes with the same broader popular music contexts as others in the collection.
The ground covered in this volume is ambitious and clearly detailed, but again, leaves questions. What is the influence of ‘new’ music on ‘old’ fans, for example? And why does youth ‘begin’ as a teenager? Could audiences for tween and pre-school music also be considered as part of popular youth culture? This last question is one where I have found these volumes particularly fruitful pieces to launch further discussion.