In Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?, cultural sociologist Andy Bennett analyses the complexity and importance of relationships between identity, lifestyle, popular music and ageing in late modernity. The book emphasises the cultural importance of pop music in the lives of a particular demographic, namely those individuals who were the first ‘to be born into a fully mediatized, fully consumerized Western world’ (p. 184) and who are now approaching later life. Through a series of qualitative case studies, Bennett demonstrates the significant role that popular music has played, and still plays, in the lives of self-identified popular music fans. Ultimately it sets up the expectation that for many ageing individuals, the pleasures and practices associated with popular music will remain a feature of their later lives.
The book is constructed in two parts. Part I contextualises current understandings of popular music audiences and ageing within cultural sociological approaches and critically examines existing representations of popular music fans in the press and in academic studies. Bennett's starting point is the belief that, for individuals growing up in the post-1950s Western world, connections to popular music via the consumption of popular music-related products (CDs, DVDs, music downloads, concert experiences) are important. Similarly, popular music contributes to practices of self-fashioning and identity building along the lifecourse (influencing individual visual representations, career paths and political sensibilities). This study argues that these concepts must be expanded to understand experiences of lifelong engagement and must look beyond current ideas of popular music being a formative youthful experience/activity, and possibly also a process of later life nostalgia.
Bennett identifies the importance of popular music as a lens through which to explore and reflect on identities, style and lifestyle choices over time. Commensurate with the highly nuanced reflexivity required to uncover life experiences and memories, he takes an ethnographic qualitative approach and utilises an informal snowballing technique to generate a sample of ageing popular music fans between the ages of 35 and 61 who live in South-East England (United Kingdom), Lille (northern France) and Adelaide (South Australia). Using this sample group, Part II of the book is constituted by four case studies which analyse distinct aspects of popular music, identity and lifestyle issues in relation to ageing.
The first case study examines the experience of changing visual identity codes for self-identified ageing punks. It reflects on the ways that modifications in subcultural punk appearance over time do not necessarily mean the abandonment of the punk ethos but is, rather, symbolic of the exchange of some of the more obvious external signifiers of punk identity for more subtle and internalised ones. Allegiances to a punk worldview and punk music remain intact but are expressed differently. The second case study explores the connections between musical tastes/allegiances and career paths. It stresses the centrality of values and practices related to popular music as the catalyst to self-generated career paths; to avoiding traditional ‘nine-to-five’ work practices; and/or to organising their lives to accommodate engaging in music-related practices around the demands of their work.
Case study three investigates notions of generational continuity and conflict in relation to multigenerational music audiences. The findings here explode commonly held views within popular music studies about inherent generational conflict. By uncovering popular music as a mechanism for communication within families and by discovering narratives of exchange within local dance party scenes and between musicians within multigenerational bands, it points to a set of new emerging sensibilities regarding age-acceptance. The final case study considers the influence of countercultural, politicised and spiritual connections forged in relation to identifications with various genres of popular music (particularly rock and punk) over time and examines how these are lived and adapted by fans as they age. Trying to stay in contact with and to live with alternative values that have been ingrained over time imagines a future where they will continue to challenge traditional values by growing old ‘disgracefully’.
The strength of this study is that it emphasises the continuing, if changing, nature of relationships with popular music along the lifecourse for post-1950s popular music fans. In particular, it challenges contemporary understandings of age, nostalgia and ideas of generational divide. It looks at how popular music practices simultaneously hold meanings in the past and in the present at the same time. This sense of past, present and possibly future continuum is, however, weakened on occasion by using the concept of post-youth which preserves a notion of generational divide that is challenged elsewhere in the study.
This publication makes a contribution to the growing academic consideration of cultural issues and ageing and its focus on popular music will be valuable to scholars from popular music studies, ageing studies and cultural gerontology alike.
