22. Why I Hate... Youth

Column, first printed in Plan B #36, August 2008.

“Flagging pursuit of happiness… Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it’s over. [Pause] False ring there.”

--Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape.

In June 2007, the Observer Music Monthly dedicated an entire issue to “the bands and fans kickstarting a youth revolution” – an indication not merely of the OMM’s hubristic zeitgeist-tracking self-image, but of the music press’ singular reverence and hunger for ‘youth’. Since the mid-20^th century pop has been primarily consumed and performed by young people; the glamour of adolescence still forms a significant part of the music and PR industry’s language. Female singers are now accorded publicity and cred according to age – hence Duffy (24) being outclassed by Adele (5 months my senior) and Kate Nash – and are usually out of careers before 27. NME pronounces a new bunch of walking acne patches the Second Coming each week; Artrocker seems to exist to convince people that an unhealthy pallor, tiny legs and sixth-generation post-punk guitars do excitement make. Even the dadrock mags have token ‘hot new bands’ to get sweaty over – witness Mojo handing out 5 star reviews to whichever trad-folk wunderkinds appear.

Neither is Plan B entirely immune: its roots in post-C86 indie music-crit leave its unstinting and commendable neophilia open to moony-eyed sentiment about ‘innocent discovery’ and ‘childlike wonder’ – used, more than is healthy, to justify wilful underachievement and aesthetic conservatism. The insistence of some writers – especially those of a poptimistic bent – that youth’s music should not be subject to critical orthodoxy, only to the blind pleasure principle, is a means of draining ideas from music. As Adorno wrote, “Reflection that takes sides with naivety condemns itself: cunning and obscurantism remain what they always were”; it isn’t criticism, but a shutting-down of criticism, of discourse.

The fixation on youth – its supposed ‘excitement’, vigour, etc. – corresponds worryingly with the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism to deny the more unsavoury realities of human existence: suffering, aging, decay and death are elided from the spectacle. The ruling class obsesses over imitation philosopher’s stones (anti-aging products, alternative medicine), while tabloid readers worry over slippages in the celebrity façade of eternal youth. In music discourse, it maintains the claim that radicalism is reserved for the young, that musicians over a certain age are fit only for the nostalgia circuit, or PR-approved, Rick Rubin-assisted Creative Comebacks. This despite the fact that there are many musicians of middle-and-advancing-age soldiering on – Whitehouse, Richard Youngs, Matthew Bower, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Portishead (average age 43) – and producing music far better than kids half, a third of their age. Some of the most compelling music writers around are in (or past) their forties: Mark Fisher, our own Everett True, Chris Bohn, Simon Reynolds. And look to the margins and the scale shifts: for example, 30 in jazz is young, and the number of musicians still keeping up the good work – Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Charles Gayle, Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, etc. – past bus-pass eligibility is inspiring; in classical, if you’re below 50 you’re no-one. The continual emphasis on the cultural production and milieu of youth is a perfect example of late capitalism’s fixation on a newness that isn’t new; a state in which, as Frederic Jameson pointed out, “an unparalleled rate of change” is twinned with “an unparalleled standardisation of everything” – the idea that the young might come up with art to shame their elders is becoming more laughable precisely as it becomes a yet more central focus of marketing rhetoric.

Youth has its tortures, too, among the worst being its ephemerality: it disappears soon enough, and to deny the value of age is to state that the rest of life is not worth living. The extension of adolescence – the impulse at the heart of poptimism and indie/hipster culture – is also the admission that the future is not worth it – the basis of a nihilism unable even to make demands. Observe the young today – their blank eyes, zombie movements – and try telling me these creatures are our be-all-and-end-all, rather than a (literal) dead-end; they seem to have, a priori, as Greil Marcus put it, “bur[ied] their nascent personalities in received images”; to have, in their regression to the boredom, indifference and petulance of childhood, foreswore any “need to explain themselves and explain the world”, any wish to change it, or their futures. These things signify not, as the myth of cool would have you believe, a spirit of adventure, of seizing the prime of life, but a resigned fatalism. The artificial excitement, the sweat and hedonism of adolescence that the press clamour after – the correlative of the hyperspeed production of late capitalism, its bipolar cycles of boom and bust – is merely the obverse to the plague of depression, mental illness and substance abuse among teenagers. The kids aren’t alright – and we should realise it.