Popular music scenes and aging bodies

During the last two decades there has been increasing interest in the phenomenon of the aging popular music audience (Bennett & Hodkinson, 2012). Although the specter of the aging fan is by no means new, the notion of, for example, the aging rocker or the aging punk has attracted significant sociological attention, not least of all because of what this says about the shifting socio-cultural significance of rock and punk and similar genres - which at the time of their emergence were inextricably tied to youth and vociferously marketed as “youth musics”. As such, initial interpretations of aging music fans tended to paint a somewhat negative picture, suggesting a sense in which such fans were cultural misfits (Ross, 1994). In more recent times, however, work informed by cultural aging perspectives has begun to consider how so-called “youth cultural” identities may in fact provide the basis of more stable and evolving identities over the life course (Bennett, 2013). Starting from this position, the purpose of this article is to critically examine how aging members of popular music scenes might be recast as a salient example of the more pluralistic fashion in which aging is anticipated, managed and articulated in contemporary social settings. The article then branches out to consider two ways that aging members of music scenes continue their scene involvement. The first focuses on evolving a series of discourses that legitimately position them as aging bodies in cultural spaces that also continue to be inhabited by significant numbers of people in their teens, twenties and thirties. The second sees aging fans taking advantage of new opportunities for consuming live music including winery concerts and dinner and show events.