By Anne T. Donahue
I like to describe myself as elderly because in many ways I am. I carry hard candies in my bag. I need a nap in the afternoon. I wake up and go to bed freakishly early. I will not turn my nose up at a 4 pm dinner. Everything is too loud. My back hurts. The other day I saw a cloud, so I yelled at it.
But also, I turn 39 this week and outside of the traits that make me your grandmother’s friend, I am but a wee baby teen. I don’t feel 39. On most days, I feel the same way I did at 16, counting down for the first day of school and trying to look cool while organizing my bag on a bench in the mall. I have not lost the delusion that comes with being very young, listening to the pop girlies, and telling myself that we share the same narrative despite my own life being very boring (thank whatever-higher-power-you-believe-in). Which is something I know I’m not alone in: every person I’ve spoken to about aging this week has underscored the fact that nobody feels like whatever a grown-up’s supposed to feel like. Nobody feels 30-something or 40-something or on the tail end of 60. Which means that nobody’s too old for pop music.
This summer has been an adventure in pop music. While I know there’s no feud between Charli and Taylor, Brat was still a necessary antidote to sparkly onesies and three-hour tours. I wrote the week before last about the way the pop this summer ushered in new attitudes and an alternative avenue for listeners in need of mess and flaws, and that need is not age-specific. There’s a reason we’re gravitating towards mixes giving indie sleaze and debating whether to wear Von Dutch unironically: there’s no expiry on revelling in any aspect of pop culture, especially when it’s so fucking fun.
That’s what I think is missing the most in all of our age-centric rhetoric. We focus on what we “should” like, “should” wear, “should” listen to, and we forget that deep down, we’ll always be those baby teens who cannot believe their good fortune of having poutine at the mall again for dinner. The reason Brat vibes were appealing was because they eschewed seriousness. The reason we’re listening to Short and Sweet on repeat is because it’s an adventure in wordplay and frivolity. Twisters is the resurrection of the popcorn film. The reason we’re tempted to return to our early aughts’ wardrobes is because they represent that golden era of being incredibly concerned about which bar everybody was going to. Katy Perry’s venture back into pop wasn’t only a snafu because the song itself was terrible, it was because she had misunderstood the assignment: the joy and fun of the summer wasn’t calculated. It just was.
I think we need to stop assigning a level of seriousness to our consumption of the holy trinity (movies/music/TV) so we can begin simply to like them again. No one is too old to be psyched. No one is too aged to crank the “Guess” remix. None of us are too withered to celebrate the camp of the new Carpenter/Ortega video. Personally, I am too old to wear kitten heels, but that’s because I need a sensible sneaker to combat my temperamental knees. But is that age? Or is it due to having been an idiot who believed she could snowboard during the winter of 2002? (It is both, but that is fine.)
If there’s one thing to take away from the summer that was, it’s that despite evidence to the contrary (birth certificates, I.D. cards, etc.), age does not apply to the celebration of popular culture. It was fun to watch Glen Powell pretend a tornado was a bull. It was a blast to commit various Top 40 dances to memory. May every season remind us to eschew the confines of constructed identities like being “too old” to scream-sing “Pink Pony Club” in the car running errands. Especially with the news that Oasis has finally reunited. Believing they’ll manage to stick together for the entire tour requires the naivety and open heartedness of the young.
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