Rock 'n' roll, unlike jazz, blues, cabaret and classical music, has never figured out what to do with ageing deities. No one told Duke Ellington or Arthur Rubinstein or Lionel Hampton or Andres Segovia to stop playing when they turned 30, 40, 50 or, for that matter, 90. Smoothies such as Tony Bennett retain a strong appeal well into their 80s; they are not thought of as old, but as venerable. Luciano Pavarotti's declining gifts in his autumnal years were graciously overlooked by his adherents out of respect - or perhaps even gratitude - for his youthful triumphs. People knew that he was finished. That was no reason to stop adoring him. As for blues singers, not only does the public not resent their being a bit long in the tooth, they expect them to be old, acting as if BB King and Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters were born brandishing canes and foraging about for their reading glasses.
Only in the rock genre does the ageing process make the public feel uncomfortable; only in the world of rock do middle-aged performers feel pressure to exit the scene before they start making fools of themselves. Sometimes this pressure comes from the public, but the most vehement exhortations to blow town come from music critics and pundits who, with the exception of a few chosen ones - Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Neil Young, David Bowie and other beneficiaries of some sort of cultural coolness pass - would like all the Claptons and Collinses and Joels and Stewarts to get off the stage, go into retirement, take up Scottish country dancing, move to Spain, play more cribbage, or just curl up and die.
This year, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince will turn 50. Even for those of us who never seriously believed that any of the Beatles would actually turn 64 - which John Lennon and George Harrison did not - it is hard to believe that this trio of performers, who once symbolized the insolence and iconoclasm and adrenaline of youth, are now walking museum pieces, just as it is hard to believe that former teen idols Johnny Depp and Keanu Reeves are now both in their 40s. It is not just that people such as this become famous when they are young; to a large degree these people become famous because they are young.
Ageing performers whose records are ignored and whose concerts no longer sell out often grumble that the music they are recording today is just as good as it ever was. This is not true: Rock stars never do work in their 30s that approaches the quality and originality of the work of their teens and 20s. Fame brings too many distractions, even the mildest affluence is the implacable enemy of creativity, and, most important, musical styles change and musicians can rarely change with them. A sure sign of panic is the statutory David Byrne/Peter Gabriel/Paul Simon trip to the developing world in search of inspiration.
But even more to the point is that being just slightly older than the audience was always part of the Faustian marketing arrangement. Pop music, which is as much about demographics and style as it is about culture, is for the most part produced by the young and targeted at the young. This is because young people do not want to listen to their parents' music, even if their parents' music is listenable. It also means that performers need to get started early and clean up quick because the spotlight dims fast. Audiences may grudgingly accept that they themselves are ageing, but they expect their idols to remain young forever. The results are often grotesque: singers who cannot remember the lyrics, lead guitarists who cannot remember what key they are supposed to be playing in, drummers who cannot keep the beat, flautists who can no longer support themselves on a single leg, rhythm guitarists who have to do the entire show sitting on a chair. Some performers can survive the stigma of age, but most rock stars end up playing private parties in Los Angeles, corporate functions in Osaka, free concerts in Paramus, New Jersey. If they are lucky.
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