Hi friends,
About ten years ago, I was at a warehouse party in Los Angeles when I noticed a man who looked to be in his seventies. Shaved head, leather pants, no shirt, completely absorbed in the music.
What struck me wasn’t that he seemed out of place.
It was how completely he belonged there.
Most of the room was decades younger, but there was nothing about the way he was listening or dancing that suggested he was visiting somebody else’s culture. He understood the language of that room. Maybe he had been speaking it longer than most of the people there.
I’ve thought about him many times since.
We still tend to talk about music scenes, particularly dance music, punk, indie, and other underground cultures, as belonging to young people. But many of those supposedly youthful movements have now been around for decades.
Someone in their sixties today could have experienced the Second Summer of Love firsthand. Someone in their fifties might remember early warehouse parties in Los Angeles. Punk is more than fifty years old. Hip-hop has crossed that threshold too. House, techno, ambient, and countless other sounds that once represented a break from the previous generation now belong to several generations at once.
Something interesting happens when youth culture survives its youth.
Scenes become genres. Genres develop traditions. Eventually somebody calls them “legacy,” which can make music sound as though its most interesting years are behind it.
But music rarely behaves that way.
Jazz has supposedly died countless times, yet somebody is always keeping it alive until another generation discovers it and gives it another turn. I grew up around the beginnings of what eventually became known as shoegaze, so watching younger bands embrace distortion, buried vocals, and walls of guitars can occasionally produce the feeling that they’re reinventing the wheel.
And then I remember that reinventing the wheel is part of the point.
A 20-year-old discovering My Bloody Valentine today isn’t hearing the same thing I heard decades ago. They bring different references, technology, anxieties, and experiences to it. They take something that already existed and make it useful to themselves.
Every generation deserves that opportunity.
That’s one of the ideas behind Vintage24, our channel built around music and programs from KCRW’s past. I don’t think of it simply as an exercise in nostalgia. The more interesting possibility is creating a conversation between then and now.
A program recorded decades ago can suddenly sit next to something being made today. A listener can hear an artist, genre, or scene in its original context and then recognize how those ideas continue to move through contemporary music. Maybe that’s why the divisions between generations feel less useful to me than they once did. The person who discovered house music in the 1980s and the kid making it on a laptop today can stand on the same dance floor. Someone who bought a record when it came out and someone discovering it forty years later can both feel that it belongs to them.
Maybe the goal was never to stay young.
Maybe the goal is to stay curious.
And if you’re still curious, I’m not sure you ever really age out of music.
- Ale
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