leaving high school

“There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.” Only extremely recent advances in neuroscience have begun to help explain why.

It turns out that just before adolescence, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that governs our ability to reason, grasp abstractions, control impulses, and self-­reflect—undergoes a huge flurry of activity, giving young adults the intellectual capacity to form an identity, to develop the notion of a self. Any cultural stimuli we are exposed to during puberty can, therefore, make more of an impression, because we’re now perceiving them discerningly and metacognitively as things to sweep into our self-concepts or reject (I am the kind of person who likes the Allman Brothers). “During times when your identity is in transition,” says Steinberg, “it’s possible you store memories better than you do in times of stability.”

-- “Why You Truly Never Leave High School” by Jennifer Senior

My teenage years were filled with the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, and Astral Weeks. I like to think my musical tastes have gotten broader as I got older … I used to get admiring laughs from students at Cal when I would demonstrate the difference between funk and disco by playing “The Big Payback” by James Brown … but I’m kidding myself. In my post-adolescent life (i.e., adulthood), my musical favorites have been Bruce Springsteen, punk, Prince, Sleater-Kinney, and Pink. Springsteen was famously called rock and roll future, but he was always far more a compilation of what came before. Punk felt revolutionary, but the music was a return to roots. Prince could do anything, but ultimately, he was Sly and the Family Stone with Hendrix sitting in on guitar. Sleater-Kinney were riot grrrls, to be sure, but by the time they met their hiatus with The Woods, it was clear they were indebted as much to Led Zeppelin as they were to Bikini Kill. Pink has offered wonderful covers of Led Zep and Queen and Janis Joplin … when I saw her at the Fillmore, she fit right in. I haven’t strayed too far from my teenage roots.

As I type this, I’m listening to “Live with Me” from Let It Bleed by the Stones. It’s part of my never-ending project/playlist, “FM”, with close to 3,000 tracks that were played on “underground” radio in the late-60s. (Coming up on the playlist: Jefferson Airplane, Beatles, Quicksilver Messenger Service.) This is my go-to playlist when I want to listen to comfort music. (There is nothing “comforting” about songs like “Inside Looking Out” by the Animals, but the ambiance they suggest is comforting.) It’s perilously close to nostalgia, which I hate in myself.

So I suppose it makes me feel better to read Jennifer Senior’s article and find that it’s not nostalgia, it’s neuroscience.

I want music to matter to me. Music in general mattered when I was a teenager, by which I mean I had favorites (Beatles, Velvet Underground, Yardbirds, Astral Weeks) but the integration of music and life was truly important (which is why my comfort playlist isn’t focused on a particular artist, but on the FM radio stations that got me through those years). I was 22 years old when we first connected with Bruce Springsteen, and that’s been a constant ever since. And there have always been others who mattered more than most: Dylan, Lou Reed, the Clash, Prince, Hüsker Dü, Sleater-Kinney. When S-K went on their “hiatus”, I suspected that I had experienced my last love affair with a musical artist. I was too old to crank it up all over again. Since then, I’ve seen Wild Flag three times and the Corin Tucker Band twice, but that’s not moving forward. I’ve seen Pink four times, with a fifth coming this fall … she’s easily the artist about whom I obsess the most these days, outside of Bruce. But I always feel like an observer in Pink’s universe. It’s not like with Sleater-Kinney, where somehow even a middle-aged guy like me felt a part of a community.

I spend a lot of time ranting about the evils of nostalgia, and get cranky at people who quit enjoying new music after they reach a certain age. Perhaps I should look in the mirror.

Comments

[Tomas]

Beautiful stuff.

[Steven Rubio]

It's like when I want lots of Likes on Facebook, I just post a picture of the grandchild. My blog always seems better if I include an Astral Weeks video clip :-).

[Chris]

I think about this a lot when I play the game, SongPop. I nearly always pick "the 70s Decade" or "70s Songs" or "Love Songs of the 70s." My next popular category is "60 Songs," and that sometimes surprises my friends who know I was born in 1960. But for me, because I'm the youngest of five, growing up I also listened to whatever my older brothers or sister listened to. (Heck, even what our parents listened to.) Nostalgia for me is indeed the music of my youth, but it is also the music of my siblings and parents. And that's alright with me.

[Steven Rubio]

That's a good point. Our adolescent music isn't just what was popular at the time, but also what our older siblings listened to. When I think of "my" music in my high school years, I include the early Rolling Stones albums Geoff had (happily, I don't think about his Bobby Rydell album).

[Tomas]

I meant your writing, not the song, but that's good, too.

On the brain thing, I am a mix of the music of my youth and the music from before I was born that I also heard but also didn't hear growing up. I think the last of it might have come to me in my mid-20s, when my last academic mind expansions were also happening. Maybe there's a connection...

[Cynthia]

well, I cannot blame my parents for my obsession with the Grateful Dead, but I can blame them for the fact that I know classical music as well as I do. step parental units were into opera, folk, jazz, and classical. I found the blues on my own, after discovering the Dead.

then again, I discovered the Dead when I was about 14 or 15 years old (same general time as Springsteen) so point? (and I was the oldest sibling. hm.) (there are, however, things I listened to as a late teen that I cringe at now. does she account for that?)

[Steven Rubio]

I kinda hoped you were complimenting my writing, but I don't take praise very well, he said blushing.

Re: catching up with our pre-past. I think it was Kael who claimed that we fetishize that which comes just before our awareness. (OK, she would never use the word "fetishize". Maybe I shouldn't, either ... spell check doesn't like it.) She was referring specifically to the popularity of Bogart among college kids in the 60s. In my case, the obvious example is Elvis. I have memories ... once when I was a kid and had to get a shot at the doctor's office, my dad said he'd get me an Elvis 45 if I took the shot ... but the Beatles were closer to my generation. Later, I became obsessed with the King (and the 50s in general).

[Steven Rubio]

Cynthia raises a good point ... actually, Chris hinted at it as well ... that our parents also influenced our music tastes. I tend to overlook this ... my position is that rock and roll was different enough from the popular music that preceded it that a barrier was created between generations (our parents didn't like rock and roll, we didn't like Sinatra). Same thing happened with rap/hip-hop. But I'm simplifying to no useful purpose. Whatever my thoughts about the particular musicians my parents liked, the important part was that music was part of their lives, and they passed that along to their kids.

[Tom]

Well said. For me, returning to the music that I listened to in my formative teenage years is a return to the familiar, my Comfort music, as you put it. That's not to say that I don't listen to new artists, or don't have recent favourites that I constantly play, but I no longer have the time I once had to explore new music.

What I don't understand is the sentiment expressed in the article you quoted, and that I have heard before, that it is somehow not right to still be listening to the same music at 40, 50, or 60 that you listened to as a teenager. Apparently, neuroscience can explain the individual's reason for it, but what societal reason makes some of us question our musical tastes, other than rock and soul probably weren't what 40, 50, and 60 year-olds were listening to when we were teens?

[Steven Rubio]

Tom, you're becoming a regular! Thanks for posting.

I wrote a piece once that was eventually anthologized in a book (which doesn't make it good, but at least it raises it above my usual fare) that deals with some of this. Shit, it's been 20 years! http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1993/06/rubio.html