Aging: Rock N Roll’s Newest Subject?
I’m not sure I agree with the premise (pop musicians from the 1960s — including Leonard Cohen, pictured — have been doing Geezer Rock for at least a decade, when the first Boomer found his first grey hair) but here’s the Independent article anyway: ‘”Hope I die before I get old,” Roger Daltrey declared in The Who’s 1965 song “My Generation”. Pete Townshend, then 20, wrote the words in the voice of a speed-gulping mod, a raging adolescent foreseeing no future. He was keeping faith with the 1950s rock youthquake, and anticipating the hippies who trusted no one over 30. Many of rock’s heroes, from Janis Joplin to Amy Winehouse, obligingly died at 27. In 2012, one of Townshend’s contemporaries, 63-year-old Peter Hammill, is by contrast singing this, on his remarkable new song “All the Tiredness”: “All the tiredness that you’ve held in waiting, in abeyance, now comes rushing in… Though I made it through the shows, something got left behind, a debt I owe.” The Van der Graaf Generator vocalist lists the inescapable exhaustion that hits the body in its sixties. This is rock’s new subject, as the elixir of youth it promised fails, and its makers and listeners face decrepitude and death. When you don’t die before you get old, Hammill has survived to say, this is how it feels.’
