Music, Style, and Aging

"As we age, we not only draw on popular music to memorialize our misspent youth, but as models for living, in all stages of life. In Music, Style, and Aging , Andy Bennett explores how baby boomers and other middle-age music fanatics continue to invest deep house, DIY hardcore, and psychedelic rock with political, philosophical, and spiritual significance. Like a great record, this book will find fans among teenyboppers and punk rockers of all ages." —David Grazian, author of Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs

"The interviews are freewheeling and often very frank....(A)n important--and enjoyable--contribution to the scholarly literature on popular culture and aging." —Library Journal

"What is compelling here is how Bennett’s respondents justify their stylistic transformation.... This provides readers with a rich insight into the association between style and authenticity for (some) middle-aged fans.... Music, Style, and Aging is an agenda-setting work that promises to inspire scholars to study the importance of culture as we age." —Contemporary Sociology

"Bennett tackles a long-neglected question: How have postwar generations’ youthful experiences with music and music scenes affected their adult lives? Bennett is at the forefront of new scholarship considering subcultural and music scene participation across the life course.... Carefully researched, engagingly written, and theoretically provocative, Music, Style, and Aging makes an important and long-awaited contribution to popular music studies, youth studies, subcultural or scene studies, and youth transitions." —American Journal of Sociology

"The first book-length study to take aging rock fans seriously and to comprehensively explore the continuing resonance of rock in various aspects of their lives." —Robert Drew

"(A) thought-provoking study of the changing lifestyles of rockers and punks not dead, just aging.... Both the theoretical and the empirical parts of the book are fruitful, but the case studies are more captivating. They unveil stories of toned-down styles—e.g. punks with discreet Mohawks and few piercings but with enough visual signs to be recognized as old punks…. This book fills various gaps in the sociology of music. First of all, it examines a topic still marginal, studying not just popular music fans but some of the most overtly rebellious ones, especially those who have aged as well as those still following a distinctive style and refusing to give up. Second, this study is a crucial step towards the dissociation of two fields that have long been held as going hand-in-hand—popular music studies and youth studies. But perhaps the most intriguing gap this book fills is in the way the research was carried out: guided first and foremost by (Bennett's) personal curiosity." —Popular Music and Society