"Much like sports, music tends to be a young person's game, and especially so since the earliest years of the rock 'n' roll era, when artists like Chuck Berry, the Coasters, and Eddie Cochran found pay dirt by mining a hitherto underexplored topic in American song: teenage angst. In the mid-1950s, the idea that the cutting edge of pop would come to be dominated by relatively young people writing songs for and about people even younger was a revolutionary notion,"
"'I hope I die before I get old,' the Who's Roger Daltrey sang back in 1965, coining a slogan for a genre-though, 60 years and many millions of dollars later, he's likely glad his wish failed to come true. Even as septuagenarians and octogenarians like Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, respectively, continue to tour to ever-more-astounding box-office receipts, they're doing so largely on the back of music they made 40, 50, even 60 years ago."
Leroy 'Satchel' Paige remarked, 'Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.' Music, like sports, tends to privilege youth, especially since early rock 'n' roll artists mined teenage angst as subject matter. The mid-1950s established youth dominance in pop, making young performers writing for younger audiences a revolutionary shift that soon became normal. Roger Daltrey's line 'I hope I die before I get old' captured rock's youth fixation, even as artists such as Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones continue lucrative tours built on decades-old material. The Replacements' 1984 album Let It Be centers on growing up, recorded by members still in their teens and early twenties, and receives a deluxe reissue from Rhino.
Read at Slate Magazine
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