Pop Music & Aging

It's nine-thirty A.M., still theoretically rush hour, but I'll be driving north, against traffic. Keeping one eye on the road, I reach absently into the messy heap of CDs scattered on the seat beside me, an eclectic assortment sypmomatic of a vague and misguided effort to transcend my actual age. It's not necessarily that I'm afraid of aging; I just refuse to do it alone. And so, at thirty-four, I'm listening to Everclear, Blink 182, Dashboard Confessional, Foo Fighters, and a host of other contemporary stuff. My audio Rogaine. I've somehow managed to beat the odds and keep a full head of hair, but that's really beside the point. We're all going bald somewhere.

Besides, I come from the eighties, a neon, hair-sprayed decade from which very little music made it out alive. When was the last time you heard Men at Work, Thompson Twins, or Alphaville on a mainstream radio station? The music from my youth has aged poorly and is now like a joke out of context. You had to be there.

- Jonathan Tropper, The Book of Joe

Other than line about full head of hair, that could be me. That could be any number of my friends, too. Just a couple nice paragraphs from a gorgeous book...