Why, as we age, do we stop discovering music? A recent Julie Burchill article in response to Daniel Dylan Wray’s in The Guardian, got me thinking.
Burchill claims it’s because modern music has been ruined by cultural appropriation. Wray’s reasoning is more varied – the sheer volume of cultural content, the fact we go out less as we age.
There’s no doubt this happens to most of us. In my novel The Edge,the protagonist Adam, a music industry exec, observes his symptoms with existential dread: “The sense of befuddlement he’d noted, gradually settling in his once-passionate, non-industry friends, had recently come over him, too. He’d begun to occasionally mispronounce artists’ names, to confuse second and third albums.” For Adam, losing his passion means professional jeopardy.
I think Burchill is wrong about cultural appropriation being the cause (though she’s right to laud the mighty ZE Records). It’s true that this rather puritanical accusation is often a bit silly. But black music has been regularly co-opted and sanitised by white producers and artists - trip hop and latter-stage dubstep are both examples. Nowadays artists just have to be a bit more thoughtful.
Older people thinking music is getting worse is nothing new – every generation has said it since popular music emerged in the ’50s. If there’s any truth in it, it’s perhaps because music gradually becomes more professional, cleaner and more corporate-minded.
Nor is the “mushrooming indifference” that Wray notes among his late-thirties friends unique to his generation. I’m a few years older than him, and it’s been happening in my friendship group for years. And most of these were serious music fans, some even DJs and occasional producers.
But in truth, it’s unusual to be a hardcore music fan in the first place. I remember a presentation by Radio One execs, in which they showed a diagram of three concentric circles. The largest represented the giant mass of very casual listeners. The second, a slightly more actively interested tier. The smallest, in the middle, was the hardcore – the people that thought new music genuinely important to their lives. It made sense to me: in my own youth, only a couple of friends were as obsessed with music as I was.
Another key factor is antecedence. You might hear a band at the age of 14 or 18 that sounds like nothing else. If you’re over 30, you can likely identify each of its influences, and conclude you’ve heard it all before. This is the key urge to resist if you want to remain interested. Absolutely everything has antecedents, but good music always adds something new.
Adam reflects on this in The Edge. When younger, he’d “observed a jaundiced cynicism in older music fans with a kind of disgust. Nirvana, they told him, are just ripping off Pixies. It was clear, then and now, that they’d completely failed to hear the originality in music they’d been confronted with.” However open one’s mind though, we’re less easily impressed as we age.
Add in children, demanding jobs and marriage, and following new music becomes difficult. Perhaps there’s something in the notion of author and cultural commentator Jonathan Rauch’s “happiness curve”. Young people look forward because there’s simply a lot more ahead. Nothing is fixed, everything is yet to come. By the time you’re 40, it’s pretty clear where you’re headed. Youth is heat and light. Middle age brings more sedate pleasures to leaven the years of drudgery. Among them is nostalgia.
But that’s why it’s worth making the effort to discover the new. There are records out there you’ll fall in love with, and they open the world up in a way looking backwards doesn’t. Hell, they may even resonate with the experience of middle life.
Here are five new artists to dig into now, whatever your age:
Sorry
An insouciant indie duo with brilliant songs. Talking of the heat and light of youth, that bittersweet euphoria is captured perfectly by Let the Lights On.
TSHA
Used to love dance music but nowadays don’t know where to start? Try TSHA’s bright, poppy club music, which sounds equally good at home. Start with Sister.
Fontaines DC
I know, I know, you’ve already heard of them. Oh, you haven’t? This generation’s indie band set to enter the pantheon. Start with A Hero’s Death.
MJ Lenderman
Do you like classic rock songs played in a slanted, rawer way (think Pavement / Dinosaur Jr)? MJ Lenderman’s urgent, southern-rock-indie is brilliant. Try Boat Songs.
Vince Staples
One of the best current hip-hop artists. Impress friends with the inspired Summertime ’06, which Pitchfork said “expresses complex ideas in plain, hard sentences”.
