Music Molly

an argument for listening to new music and not worrying about getting old

I was doing my horrid morning scroll on Twitter and came across a chunk of text that displeased me (this happens often on Twitter...it's what keeps me coming back, the displeasure...):

And, of course, it's mostly all a negotiation with aging. As one of the oldest Millennials, I'm watching as my generation reaches middle age and reacts to that transition, and I can give you an initial verdict on how it's going: not well, at all. We're mostly adjusting to it by not adjusting to it. So, so many Millennials are confronting the end of their youth by performatively embracing youth culture, loudly declaring that the only music that matters is that which you discover on TikTok. They need everyone to know that they've spent the cost of a new Toyota on tickets to the Eras Tour. (Which soaks up seats that might otherwise be available to actual young people, not wine moms with too much money, but nevertheless.) They might like music. But in a much deeper way, they need it. They need what they think it represents.

As it turns out, this chunk of text came from a long Freddie deBoer newsletter about poptimism. I don't know much about Freddie deBoer other than that his weird takes on music often end up in my feed, and that he often speaks of "Williamsburg" as a synecdochic placeholder for "indie culture," which is a funny thing to do in 2024 (Ridgewood, we have moved on to Ridgewood); in this essay he re-reads the seminal 2004 Kelefa Sanneh New York Times essay against rocktimism, and works himself into a tizzy thinking about how said poptimism has apparently, 20 years later, ruined all critical thinking about pop music and made the Music Opinion Arena a place for elder millennials to cling to their youth by performatively loving the fresh new pop whippersnappers like...Taylor Swift...a woman who has been famous in America since 2006.

One of his numbered points in the newsletter is "It’s more embarrassing to try and keep up than to fall behind." deBoer reserves more respect for "the guys sitting in lawn chairs smoking shitty weed and listening to Superunknown for the billionth time" than "a 37-year-old parent" who "start[s] a TikTok to aggressively display how much you love Camilla Cabello," or "an aging straight white man who ostentatiously parades around in his many Taylor Swift t-shirts, just waiting for someone to say something vaguely judgmental so that he can righteously perform the role of hip older guy." Don't go chasing waterfalls, he says to us, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to.

[Kendrick Lamar voice] I GOT A BONE TO PICK. I am in the generational cohort that deBoer admonishes. I am famously 34 year old, and even though I was born in 1989—the Eighties—I like to listen to music made by people younger than me, in some cases much younger, like half my age younger. And I think that's good and I'm going to tell you why.

Before I do, I just have to ask—who is this 37-year-old parent making fan TikToks for Camila Cabello? Where is the mythical middle aged straight male Taylor Swift stan? It sounds like deBoer has spent a lot of time online. Which, yeah, that's an easy thing to do, and I do it too. But if you spend all day digesting blue check takes on Twitter and swiping through an accursed For You Page designed to alternately stimulate you and piss you off, you will maybe start to believe these people are real. They are not real. Even if they seem real, they are actually caricatures created to furnish your titillation and anger, and your titillation and anger will make them money when you watch their videos and read their tweets. I went to the Eras tour and the age range was vast; in its aftermath, I see a piece of Eras tour merch bopping around in LA once a week and it's usually on the back of a woman who shares the same demo as Taylor Swift. Who, by the way, is 34. Are we telling people in their thirties to stop listening to Taylor Swift? As the young people say, be fucking for real.

So that newsletter titillated and angered me enough to write a blog post about it, which is cool, I'll take my inspiration from anywhere. The main thing I want to say is that if you are looking at yourself from above, if you are examining yourself from the outside, and thinking about yourself as a particular *type of music listener*, I think you have already lost the game.

There was a time, pre-world wide web, when external cultural identifiers mattered more. You really were what you ate, your consumption put you into a clear box, like the ones listed by that lady in Ferris Bueller's Day Off: sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads. You could ID yourself by just whom you thought was a righteous dude.

The internet blasted all of that away, and maybe that's what makes deBoer so uneasy. You can be a teenager listening to Fleetwood Mac, or you can be a millennial woman listening to FearDorian. You can be a Brazilian teenager threatening the life of anyone who speaks ill of Katy Perry, or you can be an American "wine mom" threatening the life of anyone who speaks ill of Katy Perry. I genuinely don't think external demographic signifiers matter as much as passion does, and caring does. And those aforementioned shitty weed-smoking Soundgarden fans probably technically care about Superunknown just as much as any Swiftie cares about 1989 or folklore or whatever, it's just expressed in a way that feels less actively cringe.

I enjoy music, that is the title of the blog. And I don't mean this in a "let people enjoy things" way, but it's simply never been easier to enjoy the music you enjoy without worrying about What It All Means, or worse, What Other People Might Think. And if millennials like moi want to hit pause on listening to new artists and luxuriate in the splendour of Channel Orange or Lemonade or Body Talk or Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, that's totally fine. It's stressful out there, art doesn't diminish just because you keep pressing play on your personal classics.

Still, I would encourage people my age to keep an open mind and delve into some new music by younger people without the fear of seeming old and lame. That's what can keep your brain springy even as consumer culture hopes it will calcify into something solid and simple and easy to sell products and services to. That's what keeps you connected with younger generations so we don't end up enacting on Gen Z and Gen Alpha what Boomers enacted on us. You don't have to be a 37-year-old starting a Camila Cabello stan account (again, I don't think this is a real thing that is happening) and you don't have to throw elbows in the pit at the Olivia Rodrigo show. You don't even have to be on TikTok! Just keep the ears open.

I shall close with one of my favorite quotes on aging vs. youth in the musical matrix, because I will never shut up about the equanimity with which Erykah Badu approached the change in listening habits between her generation and her son's, which she described in a 2018 Vulture interview as a change in "vibration":

How has hip-hop changed in the two decades since Baduizm? As much as the people have changed. We’re in such a different place. My son, Seven, is 19. I’m seeing him evolve into this creature that I never thought I could create. Without even trying, he’s an improvement on his father’s design. His thinking. His logic. His compassion. It’s an evolutionary cycle. People acted out in new ways when rock and roll first came out, and the blues, and bebop. Here’s how I think of it: My favorite cartoon is The Flintstones. It’s the funniest thing to me. But when my children are sitting with me trying to watch it, the whole frequency is too slow for them. Everything has sped up and recalibrated; the children are vibrating faster. They’re way ahead of us. That’s how hip-hop has changed.

Like it or not, the vibration is going to change with each new generation. We don't have to try to match it, and we probably won't be able to even if we try, but shouldn't it be a good thing to at least sample it and see what's going on? The fear shouldn't be that we will end up lame and cringe and out of touch—it should be that we might disconnect from people younger than us and end up as shitty as our forebears. Anyway, I'm bumpin' that, that's that me espresso, if you remember the '60s you weren't really there, it's morning in America, skibidi toilet, a long long time ago I can still remember how that music used to make me smile...

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