On the fateful June evening that Joe Biden appeared in the CNN debate against Donald Trump, the Rolling Stones were performing in Chicago. Around the same time as the leader of the free world doddered uncertainly towards the lectern, Mick Jagger catapulted from stage left faster than camera operators filming the two-hour concert could keep up with, wiggling, thrusting, strutting and pointing in purple leather and skinny jeans. Start me up! Continents apart, the two men would have been in the same year at school. Both were war babies: Biden born as leaves fell in 1942, Jagger the following summer.
Today, people living longer is an everyday miracle in a 21st century that does not frequently feel miraculous. Around one in five people in England are 65 or over; globally, there are more over-65s than there are children under five. This sets the tune for our politics in more ways than might always be audible, uniting seemingly disconnected questions like who will receive this expensive winter fuel benefit and who will be headlining this expensive music festival.
In Hope I Get Old Before I Die, the music journalist and broadcaster David Hepworth surveys how the pop and rock music of the baby boomers – “which was once supposed to be exclusively about the shock of the new” – survived for what he memorably terms rock’s third act. It’s a period he chronicles from the mid 1980s, when its protagonists were in their mid forties, to the release of the Beatles documentary Get Back in 2021 – taking in the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour, Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”, andElton John’s performance at Princess Diana’s funeral along the way. “How did we end up with rock gods in their eighties?” asks Hepworth. “How did they keep it up?”
In the 2020s, it’s easy to feel at a precipice in the antique rocker story. Enough of the biggest names from a 1960s hit parade – including artists like Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell, as well as the two surviving Beatles – are active today in a way that feels unlikely to be the case in a decade’s time. They are sufficiently old, in their late seventies and early eighties, for this to feel striking. They are old in a way that is very new.
In a 1963 BBC interview, Paul McCartney – still at that point residing in his family’s Allerton council house – amuses himself at the idea of playing Beatles music at the impossible age of 40. “Old men playing ‘From Me to You’,” he twinkles nervously, “nobody’s going to want to know that.” But they did: this December, he will likely perform that very song to sold-out UK audiences at the age of 82. There are many such cases.
It’s McCartney’s closing performance of “Let It Be” at 1985’s Live Aid – in which the 43-year-old anointed the fundraiser with the seal of a “venerable ancient” – that Hepworth fingers as the birth of rock’s third act, along with the launch of Q magazine the following year. Q helped scissor the link between the British music press and youth culture, brokering a détente between middle-aged pop stars and music media that persists to this day. (Conveniently, both events share a protagonist in the form of Hepworth).
Has any generation in history suffered more accusations of good luck than the boomers? Here’s another one: once the creative muse had handed the hitmakers of the Sixties and Seventies their P45s, this artistic decline dovetailed gorgeously with a cash-printing CD-reissue boom and exponential growth in the live sector. Why does that generation keep on performing? When the commercial incentives are so vast – as the accountants of the Gallagher brothers will be cheerfully observing – it would take people of monastic levels of self-restraint not to keep pushing the money button. Are most pop stars monastically self-restrained?
In Ann Powers’ book Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, she quotes the singer-songwriter during the early 2000s, frozen out of the canonisation then being declared of her 1960s male contemporaries. “What would I do?” asked Mitchell of the limited options available to her. “Show my tits? Grab my crotch?” The veneration that followed her 2022 return to the live stage was both belated and conditional. Likewise Kate Bush, who became the oldest woman to top the UK singles chart in 2022, aged 63, with her 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill” – a strange omission from Hepworth’s purview. When women are recognised, it is as the beneficiaries of “veneration inflation”. as opposed to – one must assume – the presumably gold-standard currency of the book’s parade of chaps.
Not one of the book’s 36 chapters focuses on a non-white artist. Names that should feature in any excavation of pop’s “golden generation” – Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin – are mentioned in passing or not at all. But the inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama in 2009 was, among other things, a key moment in rock’s third act, in which Wonder and Franklin performed as meaningful and dignified symbols of the enduring status of black art in America.
This continues today: this summer, Kamala Harris’s campaign released a social media video of the US presidential candidate and her running mate Tim Walz in a Franklin-themed jazz café in Detroit, chatting about their shared loves of early hip hop, Prince and Miles Davis.
In the 2010s, rock’s third act took an unlikely turn. At the start of that decade, Gil Scott-Heron – the soul poet whose “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” laid down the gauntlet for hip hop – returned from the wilderness and the US penal system with a wintry electronic album produced by the millennial Jamie xx. Senior citizens were finding something else they could be: experimental, difficult, not going quietly.
In 2016, David Bowie’s final record, Blackstar, drew on contemporary releases by the rapper Kendrick Lamar, R&B artist D’Angelo and future-forward jazzers in an album released 48 hours before his death from liver cancer. Later that year, when an 82-year-old Leonard Cohen was launching the droll and sparse You Want It Darker, his promotional message was simple and stark: “I am ready to die.” Seventeen days after its release, he did. The same is true for Scott Walker, who in the decade before his 2019 passing delivered some of the most difficult and dense music of an equally difficult and dense career. They were the doomer boomers, who, crucially, cringed at the arena rock expectations of their contemporaries and located creative rebirth in doing so.
And so, for the first time, there is a credible road map through a rock life from first strums to last wails. This happened during a decade when streaming – and the sluggish pace of rock’s own development in the 21st century – made it as unremarkable for millennials to listen to boomer artists as it was for them to turn out for senior politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders at the ballot box. In fact, older artists and older politicians had an advantage over their middle-aged counterparts, able to be embraced for their zany meme-ability and the authority derived from an association with golden-age struggles.
Now, as in rock’s first act, one artist continues to set an example that is as singular as it is, one can speculate, exasperating to his contemporaries: Bob Dylan. More interesting than him being the first musician to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 is that some of the songwriter’s finest work has followed it.
This September, the US online publication Pitchfork ranked Dylan’s 2020 track “Murder Most Foul” as one of the top ten songs of the 2020s so far. Sitting alongside Lana Del Rey and RXKNephew is Dylan’s 17-minute, musically static meditation on the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy and America’s subsequent, numbed-out retreat into pop culture.
Dylan has broken new ground for octogenarian performers with a work rate that looks like the product of some elusive celestial bargain: maintaining a more vigorous and unceasing schedule than any of his peers. But to what end? As the unsold new albums of boomer artists became coffee coasters and frisbees in record company offices, the 83-year-old’s work has grappled only more intensely with 20th-century American history and his own status within it. A comparison is the late-stage novels of Philip Roth: all counter-history and disguised memoir.
Rock’s third act is winding down as the sun sets on the classic rock generation, and rock itself. Today, almost none of the world’s top-grossing tours are from rock acts, as rock ’n’ roll heads from the concert stage to behind museum glass. No empire falls for any one reason: the high costs of a band versus laptop music; social media being gamed towards individual rather than group identities; rock’s own slide from black working-class street-corner innovation to a self-referential and fixed form that spoke only to its own past.
But here’s the catch: today’s imperious pop stars will not be forever young. Not every career will endure. But for those that do? They can look forward to living longer lives, and working for much more of it. Just like the rest of us.
[See also: How the smartphone ruined live music]
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour