The production of ageing through musical taste

Sociological studies of musical taste, participation and ageing often suggest that, for a large proportion of ageing subjects, musical tastes narrow and an investment in popular music activities commonly lessens as one ages (Holbrook and Schindler Reference Holbrook and Schindler1989). Data presented in Coulangeon and Lemel's (Reference Coulangeon and Lemel2007) study of omnivorous musical taste in France shows that, as one ages, one's musical tastes generally become more homologous. As we may expect, genres like techno, rap and rock, typically associated with youth culture and consumption, become least favoured. In Harrison and Ryan's (Reference Harrison and Ryan2010) detailed analysis of cross-sectional survey data on the life-course trajectory of musical taste, it was noted how people's taste in music commonly increases from youth to middle age,Footnote ² declining from middle age onwards into later life. Moreover, what middle-aged and older people commonly liked did not include those musics that had strong youth appeal. One explanation, among others, for why this may be so, proffered by Harrison and Ryan, considered the effects of ageing and social stigma: ‘an affinity for certain genres can become in essence anti-cultural capital because it conflicts with normative expectations of “age-appropriate” behaviour’ (Harrison and Ryan Reference Harrison and Ryan2010, p. 665, emphasis in original). In other words, for subjects to be perceived as ageing successfully, they must demonstrate – through taste – a significant distance from both contemporary youth and from the self of youth. Our major criticism of literatures such as these is the lack of attention they give to music's embeddedness in everyday cultural practices, where music tastes and extra-musical style may manifest in a variety of other ways – through films, fashion and visual arts for example – and cannot be so easily limited to more blatant measurements like listening to the radio or going to a concert.

Other literatures around music and the production of ageing that warrant mentioning here are those that emerge from music therapy and social psychologies. Music's function as a therapeutic tool is well examined, especially in relation to its ability to facilitate social interaction in older people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease (see, for example, Koger et al. Reference Koger, Chapin and Brotons1999). However, as Hays and Minichiello (Reference Hays and Minchiello2005) point out, we actually know very little about the ways healthy and independent ageing subjects use music in their everyday lives. While they attempt to unpack this with some success, arguing favourably for music's role in negotiating identity and self-understanding, constructing meaning, connecting oneself with past events, facilitating spirituality, experiencing beauty and maintaining wellbeing, they fail to discuss the specificities of musical taste, genre and extra-musical style, focusing instead on music as a singular phenomenon. Therefore, while we broadly understand music's continuing significance in the lives of older people and the ways that music continues to contribute to the health and wellbeing of the ageing subject, a question remains, however; what forms of popular music do ageing subjects use to aestheticise their subjectivity – that is, in the performance of their ageing identity – and, through this, what types of scenic relationships do ageing subjects maintain?

While it would be unfair to suggest that popular music studies has been wholly ignorant of the need for a form of address that engages with popular music's aesthetic value in a post-youth context, taking this forward in a way that constructively deals with audience clusters has been a rather different matter. For example, in her otherwise instructive reading of heavy metal culture, Weinstein refers to ageing heavy metal audiences thus: ‘Once part of the metal subculture, they are now like wistful emigrants, living a continent away in another world than their own’ (Weinstein Reference Weinstein2000, p. 111). Similarly, Thornton (Reference Thornton1995, pp. 101–3) argues that older people's continuing investment in dance club and other music-based scenes amounts to a resistance towards social ageing. In both of these well-documented observations, there seems to be the nagging assertion that ageing audiences' continuing investment in popular music, in anything other than a private sphere context, can only be understood via a need to ‘reject’ ageing through absorption in a ‘youth’ cultural environment within which they are increasingly out of place and redundant. Arguably, however, such assertions are both grounded in a relatively essentialist notion of ‘ageing’ and take little consideration of the ways in which the aesthetic properties of popular music, and the latter's value in facilitating the production and expression of lifestyle identity politics, may effectively change over the life-course.

The work of DeNora has perhaps gone closest towards investigating the shifting dynamics underpinning the relationship between music and biographical trajectory. For DeNora, music's key capacity in this respect is its role in the production of the self over the life-course: ‘In this sense, the past, musically conjured, is a reflexive movement from present to future, the moment-to-moment production of agency in real time’ (DeNora Reference DeNora2000, p. 66). Through positioning music as embedded in memory and embodied through a continuous process of reflection, DeNora illustrates how music becomes an important source of self-mapping for the ageing individual. In this way, individuals effectively produce and position themselves as ageing subjects in a context of everyday experience that extends within and across, for example, relationships, careers, families, and so on. In each of these and other everyday contexts, the presence of particular musical texts in the memoryscape resonates with their ongoing presence in the everyday soundscapes of the here and now. As such, musical experience resonates strongly with the broader phenomenological, sensual and aesthetic experiences of growing older.

DeNora's reading of individuals as actively producing themselves over time with and through music is a critical starting point in beginning to understand the complex juxtaposition of ageing, music and lifestyle in a late modern context. However, such a process of production is, in itself, inextricably linked with highly particularised forms of everyday experience generated through the interface of macro-global culture with the mundane culture of the locally specific. Again, existing work in the field of music sociology and popular music studies has established important points of reference for understanding the production of musicalised identities that draw on both local and global points of reference. For example, Bennett and Peterson (Reference Bennett and Peterson2004) demonstrate how the everyday aesthetic production of music scenes is managed amid a complex interplay of local and global resources, with scene-based relationships crystallising across three distinct, yet interrelated, terrains – local, trans-local and virtual. It follows that the production and management of ageing identities similarly corresponds with particular patterns of musical taste, style and arrangements governing scene gatherings and behaviour as these manifest themselves in specific local, trans-local and virtual contexts. Combined with the impulse of specific genre manifestations and their historical referents, such musicalised mobilisations of the ageing identity often embody distinctive manifestations of cultural politics in which forms of scenic competence, authority and even authorship are often strongly punctuated.

Where certain consumptive patterns mark age as successful or appropriate, others may mark age ‘inappropriately’. Here, emphasising the postmodern fluidity of identities, performance and reflexive agency, we will now explore those productions of ageing constructed in relation to scene affiliations that do not diminish with age and therefore, within a normative context, may be deemed ‘age inappropriate’. Specifically, we will explore the practices and subjectivities of ageing dance music enthusiasts from a local queer scene in Brisbane, Australia and ageing punk rock fans in East Kent, UK. We dispense with the logic of what may or may not be appropriate musically mediated ageing to examine the complexities of scene participation in relation to subjective constructions of an ageing that is self-aestheticised through popular music activities. Thus, we argue that popular music can retain critical currency for ageing subjects, allowing them to modulate their performance of age to incorporate the cultural practices of their chosen lifestyle.

Dance music and ageing queers

Identities – gender, sexual, racial, ethnic – may be thought of as performative in the sense that they are constructed through the repetition of norms that precede and exceed the performing subject (Butler Reference Butler1993). Yet, as we argued earlier, it would appear that age remains highly essentialised and corporeally bound, where the expectations placed upon how one is to behave corresponds with the number of years they have been alive and the tell-tale physical signs of time passed. Post-youth investment in popular music and associated scene activities noticeably troubles the normalisation of ageing identities, where certain types of scene activities often amount to what may be perceived as an improper performance of one's age (Taylor Reference Taylor2010). From middle age onwards, it is expected that one's consumptive practices, tastes and concerns ‘mature’, thus becoming more attuned to the normative foci of a post-youth life-course – work, parenting, community, retirement, and the like. This is not to say that social participation in music-related activities is assumed to cease altogether, but that the nature of the music-related activities in which post-youth subjects invest time and energy is expected to change to reflect their ageing subjectivity. For example: in accordance with the logic of normative, and thus ‘respectable’, ageing in a white, Western, heterosexual, working-class/middle-class context, it is likely to be regarded as commonplace or proper for someone in their forties, fifties, sixties or beyond to invest time in choral singing, perhaps, or to spend the occasional Saturday night dancing to their favourite crooner at the local services club or community centre. It is far less common, and by extension less acceptable, for the same ageing subjects to spend their Saturday nights dancing to progressive trance at a nightclub.

In this section, we examine ageing subjects in the context of a queer dance music scene by drawing on interview data and participant observations taken from a larger project currently in development which examines a broader range of queer music scene activities in local and trans-local contexts (see Taylor Reference Taylor2008, Reference Taylor2010).Footnote ³ The material presented here, however, draws specifically on interview data from eight tape-recorded and transcribed interviews and extensive field notes gathered in queer club spaces and dance parties between March 2009 and February 2011.Footnote ⁴ The interviews represent a sample of eight middle-aged scene participants from Brisbane, four women and four men, aged between 40 and 50 who, as post-youth subjects, continue to participate in queer club culture in a variety of ways, ranging from regular event attendance to event organisation and DJing. For those who run events and/or DJ at them, this is a hobby and not a profession, as all had full-time employment across a variety of fields including health work, academia, retail, business and information technology. None of the interviewees were primary carers of children, this being typical of the scene at large.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, bars and nightclubs have functioned as the most common and socially visible spaces in which queer scenes have congregated. Since the early 1970s, dance music genres like disco, garage and house have been intrinsically linked to Western gay male cultures in particular (see, for example, Hughes Reference Hughes, Ross and Rose1994; Currid Reference Currid, Case, Brett and Foster1995; Buckland Reference Buckland2002). Today, these and a range of other contemporary electronic dance music (EDM) genres such as electro, techno and trance (and a myriad of subgenres) can be heard in queer clubs around the world. As such, music and dancing are integral to public queer lifestyles and, perhaps more than any other musical genre, queer cultures have been most closely identified with dance music forms. For generations of people who belong to a stigmatised gender and/or sexual minority, dance music has provided a backdrop for establishing and maintaining a queer public sphere in which their gender and sexual identities can be more freely negotiated and performed and it appears that this can remain true for some participants as they age.

In the club spaces and dance parties observed, the styles of EDM played were quite varied, ranging from minimal techno to commercial/progressive house, trance and remixed retro disco tracks. It is also quite common for DJs to draw on remixed versions of funk, commercial pop, darkwave and indie/punk in their sets. The range of artists that one is likely to hear during the course of a night might include American house group Deee-lite, British electro group Underworld, Canadian electroclash artist Peaches, American dance-punk band Gossip, French electropop artist Miss Kitten, Italian electrohouse producer Benny Benassi or British progressive house duo Leftfield. However, club attendees appear to have less of an attachment for a specific artist or EDM producer, instead favouring the styles of local DJs and particular themed club nights. For when I discussed music with my interviewees they generally referred to liking the style of DJ X or DJ Y based on broad stylistic traits such as DJ X's dark and tribal feel or DJ Y's groovy funk/disco sets.

Among the middle-aged subjects interviewed, all bar one began their involvement with queer club scenes around the time they ‘came out’.Footnote ⁵ For some this was in their late teens, while for others it was in their late twenties. For one woman, however, her scenic involvement did not begin until she separated from her husband during her mid-thirties. In youth and early adulthood, the regularity of participation was quite high, with respondents reporting club or dance party attendance at least once a fortnight and up to three times a week. Now in middle age, all respondents acknowledged a partial decline in the frequency of club attendance and associated activities such as alcohol consumption and recreational drug use,Footnote ⁶ speculating that these now occur, on average, at monthly or bimonthly intervals for the majority of them. For Jemima (aged 40) and Sarah (aged 47), the reasons for decline in participation were more to do with physical injury than with a lack of desire for participation. One experienced severe back pain due to injuries sustained in early adulthood while the other had to manage a brain injury sustained in later life that decreased her mobility quite dramatically. However, said Jemima, ‘I'm really into dance culture and DJ music … and um, well I probably don't go out as much as I used to when I was younger, but I go out to dance to music more than anything else’. The reasons others gave for their decline in attendance varied between individuals but included: a noticeable increase in physical recovery time post-party; career demands; boredom with regular ‘commercial’ events, preferring instead the niche semi-regular independent events; and, for one woman, her continued unsuccessful attempts at becoming pregnant. While for all respondents ageing caused some changes in the degree and types of participation in club culture, all respondents stipulated their intentions to remain participating in the scene in similar ways for as long as physically possible: ‘I don't kid myself that I'll be 85 and on the dance floor, but while I'm still able-bodied and while my body still tolerates the chemicals [drugs], I'll still be into it,’ said Roger (aged 41). Similarly, Emily (aged 40) commented, in reference to herself and her female partner (Lucy, aged 45):

Based on our interview data and confirmed through general conversations in the field, ageing scene participants demonstrated only moderate concern for, and consciousness surrounding, external perceptions of their ageing subjectivities. Almost all of my interviewees situated themselves as ‘outsiders’ to the ‘mainstream’ which they perceived as granting them some immunity from judgement and expectation. ‘By being queer quirky or whatever we've already discounted that and we already don't fit into that box’, said Emily. In conjunction with being queer, all interviewees also noted that with age too comes a certain freedom of self-expression. ‘I'm older and I'm a bit more confident [and] I don't care what people think so much anymore’, said Tex (aged 44). In their discussions of ageing within the scene, the majority of respondents directly linked to the ideologies and politics of being queer to a more fluid, unrestricted and individually created sense of self-presentation in middle age. Jemima said that she thought perceptions of ageing were not so acute in the ‘queer world’. ‘We're a bit edgier and groovier for some reason … and hang on to [our] individual quirkiness or that individual stance in [our] appearance or what [we're] involved in much later in life.’ Tex commented that in his experiences, queer clubs accommodate a range of visual styles taken up by people of various ages because ‘queer is an alternative culture’ and the politics of queer are more ‘lefty’. Similarly, Emily commented:

For Emily, Jacob (aged 43) and Patrick (aged 50), growing older and maintaining scene involvement gives them licence to behave in ways that may appear scandalous to scene outsiders. ‘With age, we're not motivated anymore by what other people think is important or by how people think we “should” behave’, said Emily. A continued sense of association with the scene was dependent upon attendance at scene-specific dance parties which acted as the primary way in which participants would come together and collectively perform their queerness through music, dancing, costuming and sanctioned displays of queer affections. From observations and discussions, dance parties provided an ‘identity performance space’ in which a range of sexual encounters, outrageous costuming and non-normative gender performances were both sanctioned and largely encouraged. For Jacob, being in the scene normalised his ‘obsession with dancing’, as he put it, as well as his drug use, sexual promiscuity and playful cross-dressing, all of which is kept hidden from family and work colleagues in his daily life. Similarly, for Patrick the club space gave him a chance to connect with friends from the leather community and other queer communities at the same time and to embrace his leather persona in a context outside of a regular sex club or gay male leather gathering. None felt that their ageing subjectivities were problematic in the context of their current forms of scene participation, and four of them explicitly mentioned that they get credit for ‘being cool’ from younger scene members. Recalling his own experiences as a young person in the scene, Jacob said that he does not believe age is a big issue in the queer scene he participates in:

Continuing to engage in dynamic processes of identification, all of the respondents involved in this aspect of the research demonstrated an aesthetic commitment to their ageing queer identities through dance music, style and scene participation. Here then, it can be said that scene participation mobilises collective physical embodiment of their queer identity and gives participants a context and structure for continued performances of both their sexual and musical identities as they age. While the majority of sociological and popular music literatures to date have argued that it is common for middle-aged and older subjects to discard the music and scene-based identities of their youth and/or cease engaging with new musical forms, it cannot be considered an exclusive outcome of the ageing process. In contrast to the literature on dance club cultures which situate youth as not only a central but almost an exclusive condition of participation (see, for example, Thornton Reference Thornton1995; Malbon Reference Malbon1999), these individuals have reinterpreted dance club conventions so as to accommodate queer-specific post-youth identities, sensibilities and cultural practices. Dance music is thus central to their queer lifestyle project and functions centrally in the maintenance of a queer middle-aged aesthetic.

Like Kotarba's (Reference Kotarba, Kotarba and Johnson2002) study of ageing rock ’n’ roll fans and Smith's (Reference Smith and Scott2009) account of an ageing Northern Soul scene from Britain, the participants of the queer scene which we have examined can be said to incorporate the values, tastes and sensitivities of their youth into the ever more complex everyday subjectivities of adulthood. Moreover, like Hodkinson's (Reference Hodkinson2011) recent work on ageing goths who, he concluded, were ‘far from being isolated within a subculture dominated by youth, or fixated on a desperate attempt to retain their own adolescence’ (Hodkinson Reference Hodkinson2011, p. 281), the majority of my interviewees all made reference to the scene ageing with them. As Patrick so succinctly remarked: ‘we change, venues come and go, the scene changes, dance music changes, everything is always changing so there's no point in holding onto the past’. These studies demonstrate the various ways in which scene participation, music fandom and ageing subjectivities can be reconciled so as to create a space in adulthood for typically youthful musical identity articulations. Moreover, collectively, this work also points to the fact that across multiple genres of expression, ageing identities can be aestheticised through popular music activities, tastes and consumption. In order to further consider these issues, we will now shift our focus towards ageing in the context of punk audiences.

Ageing punks

Just as the urban queer scene setting described above produced a particular kind of context within which ageing identities were constructed and articulated, so the punk scene in East Kent produced its own set of interpersonal dynamics and cultural discourses of ageing. The research on this scene involved interviews with some 15 ageing punks between the ages of 42 and 55.Footnote ⁷ Most of the interviewees were from working-class backgrounds, although one had attended university. All of the interviewees were male. Indeed, the local ageing punk scene was itself predominantly male. None of the ageing punks interviewed was married to or lived with ageing female punks, nor were wives or partners present at gigs attended as part of the research. When questioned on the issue of gender among ageing punk fans, many interviewees said that other ageing punk fans they personally knew tended to be male. On one occasion Stu, an ageing male punk interviewee, offered to arrange a follow-on interview with an ageing female punk friend of his but this never transpired. Similarly, repeated attempts to secure an interview with an ageing female punk recommended by Ned, another research respondent, were also unsuccessful. To some degree, the absence of female involvement may be attributable to the nature of the scene itself. Although not stridently opposed to female involvement, discourses of male bonding and a mistrust of women, similar to those identified by Cohen (Reference Cohen1991) in her study of male, working-class local musicians in Liverpool, were evident among interviewees throughout the research.

Nonetheless, the ageing punk scene in East Kent offers a series of significant insights regarding the production of ageing in the context of a musical genre and accompanying stylistic and political affiliations that were once considered so staunchly associated with youth (see, for example, Hebdige Reference Hebdige1979; Chambers Reference Chambers1985). Spread out over a wide area of provincial towns and rural locations, sporadic punk performances in this region act as nodal points for the assembling of ageing punks, whose continuing sense of association with punk appears to be closely linked with both maintaining of face-to-face contact and listening to punk music, ranging from old-school punk to more recent styles such as ska-punk and punk-metal fusion. The emphasis upon face-to face contact is in contrast to some other examples of ageing music scenes where a sense of scene association is primarily articulated through trans-local gatherings, such as festivals, and the forms of virtual association afforded by the internet (see Bennett and Peterson Reference Bennett and Peterson2004). Moreover, unlike the observations of Andes (Reference Andes and Epstein1998) regarding the practical obstacles to remaining punk beyond the age of 30, the ageing punks in East Kent saw little in the way of obstacles, physical, aesthetic or otherwise, to their continuing association with punk. Indeed, in discussing what it meant to be a punk in, or approaching, middle age, many interviewees were generally at pains to point out the positive differences they perceived between their former youth identification with punk and their post-youth punk affiliation. For example, Jason, a 55-year-old punk, noted how as a teenager he had been motivated by the references to anarchy in late 1970s punk songs by artists such as the Sex Pistols, but now felt that such references were overly romanticised. Similarly, Ned, a punk in his mid-forties, observed:

Although often self-critical of their earlier punk selves, Jason, Ned and some other interviewees were at the same time adamant that, from the outset, punk had instilled within them a life-changing experience for the better. Ageing punks commonly suggested that punk had played an important part in their transition from youth to adulthood, providing them with a street-wise outlook and a sense of realism. Many intimated that their path to becoming what they perceived as fully rounded, critically aware individuals dated in considerable part from their initial involvement with punk and their internalisation of the punk ethic. Moreover, notwithstanding the critical re-evaluation of their punk identity over time, many older punks suggested that their basic sense of self continued to be informed by the punk ideology. Indeed, a number of interviewees considered themselves to be the very essence of a ‘punk personality’, as illustrated in the following extract from an interview with Stu, an English punk in his early fifties:

Such an ‘outsider feel’, and its personification in the ‘timeless lyrics’ (a phrase used by Stu) of British punk bands such as The Clash and the UK Subs, was related on various occasions by ageing punks, particularly when seeking to describe how their view of the world often appeared so diametrically opposed to others of their own age. References to viewing the world from a ‘punk perspective’ were numerous in conversations ranging from politics, racism and terrorism to work and career. In all such instances, ready associations were made between ‘lessons learned from punk’ and current, personal outlook. For example, one ageing punk, Jim, had elected to work with the homeless, a job which he said, despite its relatively low salary, low status and limited promotion prospects, afforded him the satisfaction that he was doing something positive to try and ‘fix a big problem that the inequalities of the capitalist system has produced’. Similarly, Steve, a punk in his late forties observed:

A common thread running through the above accounts is the way in which the ageing punks concerned have creatively evolved various means of maintaining a DIY (do-it-yourself) punk aesthetic into middle age. Indeed, all of the ageing punks cited above noted how the anarchic energy that they had identified with punk as teenagers had transformed into a more mature and studied lifestyle project over the years. In the long term, what these people appear to have taken from punk are a series of resources through which to reproduce themselves as individuals over time. Rather than seeing punk as a lifestyle project associated with the temporal limitations of physical youth-hood, the individuals discussed above consider punk as an inseparable aspect of their basic selves. While their ageing bodies have transcended conventional discourses of punk as bound up with youth-based resistance, these individuals have reworked and refined such discourses to bespeak a new, post-youth series of punk-centred sensibilities and cultural practices.