Too old for Rock n' Roll?

[Moonlit_Angel]

I love posting on message boards too. I enjoy discussing what I'm listening to and how a particular album or song makes me feel or helps me get through the day. I enjoy thinking (knowing, in some cases) that I'm able to "talk" to the artist when I post messages. And I hang out in chat rooms, and I've been absolutely delighted to meet my favorite musician (who's about to turn 50 himself...and ya know, the guy can still rock!) after a show, and I do my fair share of collecting too.

. I haven't gotten the fortune of talking to my favorite artists on a board, but I agree with the first part of your post-it's so fun to talk to other people about music-I get to hear about artists and songs that I otherwise may have had no clue about, I get to find others who love the same music I do, and they get exactly what I'm saying when I explain how much a song or a band means to me, they don't find me weird or tell me to shut up about such-and-such band or something . It's great.

Originally posted by indra
You know, I think that for a lot of very young people, someone in their late 30's or in their 40's is old. I mean when I was 20 a professor asked us to look 5, 10, 15 years ahead and think of what we wanted to be doing then. Five years wasn't that bad, but beyond that I found it really hard to even think that much further ahead. I mean, think about it...for me (at 40) 10 years either way isn't that much. But a 20 year old...10 years ago was ten years old. That's a big difference, and perhaps they know how much they have changed in the past ten years of their life and don't realize the difference in the next ten (20 or even more) years isn't that much.

Heh, well, here's one young person who has never considered late 30s or 40s old-perhaps one big reason why I don't consider that to be old is because a lot of my favorite musicians are in that age range, and they don't seem old to me, so if they don't seem old, then your average person of that age range won't seem old, either. And maybe it's also due to the fact that in some ways I've been able to relate better to people within that age range than I have some of the people around my age-I share the same musical tastes as 30 and 40 year olds, I talk about some things that a lot of people around my age usually wouldn't discuss, and so on and so forth.

But yeah, I've just never found that age range to be "old". And I do have some ideas of where I'd like to be in 10, 20 years' time. Hopefully I will achieve all that.

You are right about the whole thing with being 20 and seeing ten years ago as ten years ago-geez, I can find a major difference in myself just from reading stuff I'd written back when I was 15 and comparing it to stuff I write now, so if I can find a major difference in myself in just 5 years time, then I can definitely find major differences within the entire ten years, no problem. But I can believe that the differences in the next 10 plus years won't be all that significant. Perhaps that's due to the fact that your teen years are spent trying to find out exactly what kind of person you are and being torn between wanting to remain a kid and wanting to be a grown up, whereas once you're in your 20s and beyond, you're focused more on grown up things for the most part (of course, that's not to say that your inner kid doesn't show up every now and again-and personally, I think it's cool when adults let that kid in them out).

Angela

 

[Hewson]

Rock and roll is still a fairly new form of music (approx 50 yrs now), so there hasn't been much of a history of the audience aging until recently. Before rock, "old" people still enjoyed music and concerts, just different musical styles.
Now, the people who grew up with rock music in the 60's, 70's eevn 80's are getting older, why should they change their taste in music and their habit of attending rock concerts? I go to a variety of concerts, sometimes i'm on the older side of things, sometimes I'm pretty much around average age and some instances I'm still in the younger half of the audience (say the Stones for example).

Same thing with the musicians. Suddenly we have a phenomenon known as "Aging rockers". I remember a few years back an interview with Keef Richards, he was asked about getting old, being a grandfather and was it time to give up rock and roll, his answer was along the lines of "what else am I gonna do?, This is who I am"