Teenage Wasteland
A spooky, musical, emo correlation?
The other day I tweeted out a screenshot of a great playlist Apple had placed in the “For You” area of Apple Music. “Rock Hits: 1994” is my jam — quite literally.¹ Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkins, Live, Weezer —yes, even Candlebox. Great, great stuff.
As Steven Levy noted the other day, maybe Apple really does know what they’re doing with these playlists…
Anyway, much more interesting were the responses that the tweet generated. The first was from my friend and colleague Chikai:
Not only was he right, he was exactly right. While Chikai and I are friends, we haven’t known each other long enough for him to know my exact age — nor is he my age. Nor is our colleague Ken, who joined in the conversation:
What the hell? Has Chikai just uncovered some hidden truth about our world? Are our musical tastes somehow hardcoded into our DNA with a preference for music when you turn thirteen years old?
That’s one hell of a discovery, at least in the eyes of Ken, myself, and a few others who chimed in on Twitter. Then, literally two minutes later, having not seen Chikai’s response, in comes Nathan Taylor with his own, very similar observation:
At this point I feel like I’m having a Sixth Sense moment of clarity/insanity. But then I click on the link Nathan shared. Turns out, this may have less to do with wizardry and more to do with puberty.
As the article from 2011 in The New York Times notes, there’s a seemingly strong correlation between very popular rock & roll musicians and their age. And the argument is it’s because they all turned fourteen years old around the same time — a time when rock & roll was first exploding on to the music scene in the 1950s. As the article’s author, David Hajdu, goes on to note:
Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.
Perhaps myself, Chikai, and Ken matured slightly early,² but we’re splitting hairs at this point. Clearly, there seems to be something to the notion of music discovery as an early teenager and how that sticks with you.³
Said that way, it sounds almost obvious. And yet, I had never really thought about it in such a way: that what I listened to during my “formative” years, imprinted itself deeper in my psyche than music both before and afterwards.
And I’m perfectly fine with this, as 1994 was one hell of a year for music.
¹ Well, okay, not “mine” in that I wrote, produced, or had anything to do with these songs, of course. But more so in that they’re basically all songs I absolutely love and can listen to non-stop.
² My school was actually a little odd in that we entered high school in 8th grade, rather than 9th, perhaps accelerating the trend above for me a bit.
³ The same may be true of other types of art, as well. But it seems most easily drawn out in music since almost everyone loves at least some music.
