One of the many unsettling experiences of ageing is watching your artistic heroes age with you. But stranger still is how your relationship to their art changes over time.
You mature physically and mentally but (with a few exceptions) the content of the songs, the movies and books largely stays frozen in time.
In your youth, you’ll probably identify closely with a singer as they set the world to rights. But as you get older there’s an increasing likelihood that you might identify with the subject of the song.
It’s an unsettling feeling, like noticing a grey hair or experiencing an uncharacteristic lapse in recall.
You start out as Dylan, sneering at Mr Jones as he bumbles into the countercultural haze.
But you never expect to become Jones himself, confronted by one-eyed midgets and sword swallowers and unable to make any sense of it.
Young and ‘Old’
I’ve ‘aged’ out of a couple of my favourite songs and the realisation has hit me hard. I seem to have gone from sharing the singer’s perspective to potentially being the subject of the lyrics.
The first one was ‘Old Man’ by Neil Young.
Yes, as examples go, this one is a little bit on the nose. After all, it’s an evergreen song in which a young man addresses an older man, reasoning that their wants and needs are much the same.
Plus it’s no secret that, at 50 years old, ‘Old Man’ is still being used as a way to recast and to re-contextualise the stars of the present.
Tom Brady was born fully five years after the song’s release. Yet incredibly, the visuals surrounding Beck’s 2022 cover version cast him as the old man, with Patrick Mahomes tacitly implicated as the younger interlocutor. (Both quarterbacks won their first Super Bowl at the age of 24).
But for me, Young’s song holds an additional layer of memory and narrative association.
I’m a lot like you
I don’t know whether I first encountered ‘Old Man’ on the Wonderboys soundtrack. But the song continues to have a strong association with the movie, where it’s used to draw a parallel between two of the lead characters.
Back when Wonderboys was released, I could map myself – albeit very broadly – onto James Leer, the young student played by Tobey Maguire.
I wasn’t a closeted depressive and I’d never shot anyone’s dog (and still haven’t). But, like Leer, I was a young middle-class guy at university, writing creatively, getting hungover and spending a lot of time in soporific campus auditoriums listening to writers talking about writing.
Now, I don’t yet see myself reflected in Michael Douglas’s affable and unfocused lecturer, Grady Tripp. But I certainly recognise a lot more of myself in his weary frame than I did back in 2000.
I attended an entertaining Neil Young gig, in 2001, but the set didn’t include ‘Old Man’.
That was probably for the best. Listening to that song while standing alongside my father, and on the cusp of a life-changing year living abroad? That really would have been on the nose.
Genned up on Gen X
The second, less-obvious example of evolving into a song’s subject is What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? by REM.
This was the lead single from the band’s 1994 album Monster. It was released at what was arguably the height of the band’s imperial phase.
Although ‘What’s the Frequency’ was an explosive and catchy radio hit, its subject matter is characteristically obtuse.
Named after a surreal 1986 assault on newsreader Dan Rather, the song’s lyrics focus on an older man trying and failing to comprehend the mystifying mores of Generation X.
Stipe elaborated:
I wrote that protagonist as a guy who’s desperately trying to understand what motivates the younger generation, who has gone to great lengths to try and figure them out. And at the end of the song, it’s completely bogus. He got nowhere.
Back in the 1990s, I just liked the riff and, in any case, I appreciated everything produced by REM.
I was in no way confused by irony, apathy, or anything associated with slacker culture. I was a young teenager – I didn’t need to analyse pop culture any more than a fish needs to analyse water. It was just where I lived.
Now I listen to the song and I totally get where that confused old man is coming from.
I hadn’t understood how the mounting pressures of adulthood can force you to start consuming youth culture on an anthropological basis, if at all.
Bypassed by the zeitgeist
Back then, I couldn’t fathom how a person wouldn’t know who Keith Flint or Jayne Middlemiss was.
Now I realise those people didn’t know because they didn’t have the time to keep up with that stuff. They had 9-5 jobs to go to and families to look after.
Yes, back then there were far fewer channels to watch, and there was next-to-no internet access. But then, as now, only the young had sufficient freedom to fully submerge themselves in the daunting, unending flow of the zeitgeist, to appreciate its bizarre melt ponds and its dark, mysterious aquifers.
How else could you decode all of Select’s nuanced references to Justine Frischmann’s romantic history?
So now when I hear Stipe, in character, indignantly singing “I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines”, I hear an echo of myself.
There’s me, in 2019 canvassing my cousins’ teenage kids for music recommendations (wall-to-wall Billie Eilish). There’s me in 2023 watching a Twitch channel wondering how anyone has the requisite spatial awareness to compete in Fortnite.
And there’s me stumbling into the unfamiliar hinterlands of Twitter subculture, where I may as well be Mr Jones.
The main difference is that when I’m confronted by non-sequitur memes on social media, no one can see me frowning and floundering, before opening a tab to try to research my way to enlightenment.
That’s the moment of truth. Then a voice in my head confirms what Dylan, as a younger man, knew way back in 1965.
Something is happening here. But now I don’t know what it is.
