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By David Dudley
AARP
Modern Maturity, September 5, 2002
For
Johnny Cash, it started right about when he hit 60.
This was in the early 1990s. The
country music legend was playing a festival show in Europe, and he noticed
that the audience didn't look like the fans he was used to seeing.
"There were thousands and thousands of young people there," he
remembers. "People in their 20s and their 30s."
What happened? Throughout the 1980s,
the middle-aged Man in Black had seemed trapped in the familiar
entertainment-business arc: His record sales had declined, and younger
artists had pushed his tunes off the radio. But now suddenly Cash wasn't a
nearly-washed-up country music star any longer. He was something
else—something. . . cooler. Ask around on any college campus today: Even
the kids who barely know the tune to "Folsom Prison Blues" have
a clear and intuitive understanding that this old man is an original,
someone to be reckoned with—one very cool man.
And Cash isn't the only performer who
has experienced a late-career change of fortune. In recent years, a select
group of Americans over 60 have achieved a new kind of celebrity among the
very young, a cultural status never before imagined.
Call it Eldercool.
The alchemy of coolness is poorly
understood under the best of circumstances. Add a few wrinkles to the
equation and things get even more complicated. In a culture geared toward
the pursuit of ever younger consumers, visible maturity often equals
irrelevance. Computer wizards, television writers, and rock stars are
considered nigh unemployable after age 40. And, as many a movie star and
athlete has painfully learned, one generation's rebel hero is the next's
dimly recalled infomercial pitchman.
And yet, a handful of vintage TV
stars, well-preserved legends, hard-living music artists, and assorted
has-beens, survivors, and elder statesmen seem to have gained a mysterious
new cachet. Any way you look at it, it's a motley crew: Cuban strongman
Fidel Castro, heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali, and starship captain William
Shatner are members of the club (though you may have a hard time finding a
young person who idolizes all three). Former president Jimmy Carter has a
bit of Eldercool in him, but then so does former Batman Adam West.
Photogenically creased leading men such as Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood
make the cut; in this arena, however, they might well be overshadowed by
the Dalai Lama or even Mister Rogers.
The Eldercool are, with a few
exceptions, men. This is not because men are inherently cooler, but
because relatively fewer women over 60 have careers that give them the
sort of widespread pop-cultural resonance that Eldercool seems to require.
This will no doubt change in the years to come, as a generation of
prominent, liberated women comes of age.
While
you may not care about coolness, you might be interested in its
implication: that there is a new bond forming between the old and the
young. According to Joe Austin, assistant
professor at Bowling Green State University's Department of Popular
Culture, coolness and advanced age are not fundamentally irreconcilable.
Musical and other subcultures have always had a "canon of revered
elders" that coexisted peacefully with their younger counterparts, he
says.
As Austin sees it, the whole idea of
an impassable gap between generations is left over from the 1960s, when
youthful rebellion often took the form of a "blanket
condemnation" of age itself. Because yesterday's rebellious youth are
today's cultural overdogs—the baby boomers—today's young people live
with the scars of this epic intergenerational battle. "This mythical
fight between the young and the old is actually being created by the
middle-aged," says Austin. But, as the phenomenon of Eldercool
demonstrates, young people have looked across the divide and realized that
people their grandparents' age have more to offer than their parents might
be willing to admit.
In the case of Johnny Cash, one could
argue that it was a daring act of reinvention that revitalized his career.
Not content to play to the same old (dwindling) audiences who'd been
flocking to his concerts and buying his music for generations, in 1993, at
the age of 61, he stunned Nashville by signing with American Records in
Los Angeles, a label associated with rock and rap artists 40 years his
junior.
Since then, Cash has recorded three
spare, unrelenting albums, each hailed as a rough-hewn masterpiece by
critics. The result has been an artistic rebirth: At an age when many
performers are either retired or forcibly consigned to the oldies
treadmill, Cash now has more artistic control than he ever did before.
"I'm making a new record, and my record company and record producer
say, 'Go for it—do whatever you want to do and take however long you
want to do it,'" he says, sounding a bit amazed himself. "That's
really a blessing."
Cash is not well these days. The
singer turned 70 this year, and his years of touring have taken a toll.
He's had several hospitalizations for pneumonia, including one a few years
back that left him in a coma for several days. He has now sworn off the
road and spends the colder months of the year at his home in Jamaica. But
Cash is far from retired. He's recording a new album, and he's got a young
audience clamoring to hear it.
Johnny Cash's path of creative
self-renewal has been followed by a few of his colleagues—country
"outlaw" artists such as Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson,
both of whom now boast healthy followings among young audiences. Part-time
actor Kristofferson has been punching out vampires and gorillas in action
movies like Blade 2 and Planet of the Apes; last year,
Nelson was hailed as "The Last Outlaw" in Maxim magazine,
the quintessential arbiter of young male tastes.
But this path is also open to artists
in less hell-raising genres. Crooner Tony Bennett hit the Eldercool
motherlode when he appeared on MTV in the early 1990s. The geriatric Cuban
musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club, venerable bluesmen like R.L.
Burnside and the late John Lee Hooker, and funk founding father George
Clinton command a similar youth appeal.
Part of their allure is their
authenticity. As more movies are sequels and remakes, as more pop songs
"sample" or borrow from older recordings, these old-school
practitioners gain value in young people's eyes as the elusive real thing.
"Young people don't go for schmaltz," says Cash. "In me,
they bought honesty. Honesty of performance, simplicity of lyric,
simplicity of delivery, and honesty of feeling."
The reverse of this is equally true,
and that is what makes the spectacle of superannuated rock stars singing
songs of adolescent rebellion so unbelievable, and thus so uncool. Or so
says John Strausbaugh, editor of the weekly New York Press and author of Rock
'Til You Drop, a caustic reflection on aging and rock stardom.
Strausbaugh, 50, is an outspoken critic of baby boomers who cling to the
illusion of their youthful hipness.
Pre-boomers, on the other hand—the
defiantly and unapologetically old—don't have to bother. There is a
freedom inherent in getting older, and young people can sense it. With
nothing to prove to parents or bosses, people in their 60s and older have
the liberty to say or do outrageous things. "They almost become
rebels again, because they can speak their mind," says Strausbaugh.
So young people look at pre-boomers
and glimpse authenticity and rebellion. But they also glimpse a version of
themselves. In a society where you are your career, people at either end
of their working lives can feel ignored, powerless, and at odds with the
mainstream. The young like to perceive themselves as outcasts, but those
over 60 are often the real outcasts. Age can thus offer the ultimate
antiestablishment credentials, a fact which is now raising the profiles of
such disparate fomenters of controversy as 65-year-old Rudy Ray Moore, the
comedian and rap pioneer, and MIT linguist and political activist Noam
Chomsky. Certainly, part of Chomsky's appeal is the timely convergence of
his libertarian rhetoric with the rise of the anti-globalization movement
on campuses. But the 73-year-old activist's own dissident cachet doesn't
hurt. Likewise, primatologist and environmental activist Jane Goodall's
star power as a college speaker keeps rising.
Oddly enough, Fred Rogers, TV's
Mister Rogers, might be the premier embodiment of Eldercool's subversive
powers. For the multiple generations who grew up with Rogers's drowsily
mesmerizing children's show, an affection for Mister Rogers isn't an
ironic wink at the whole cardigan-wearing enterprise. This is largely
because the 74-year-old Rogers is the pure, unflinching absence of irony,
so immune to the cultural forces around him that he seems invulnerable.
"Fred Rogers is a supremely confident man," observed National
Review's Michael Long. "If you're over the age of 10, he doesn't
really care what you think of him. And that's real power."
That confidence is the same power
that one now sees in such saintly elder statesmen as former South African
president Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist
leader who commands a faithful legion of young celebrities here in the
U.S. In these cases, Eldercool is an effortless byproduct of the life
being lived, not a calculated manipulation of image. In other words,
Eldercool—unlike the more studied coolness of the young—demands of its
bearer only the vaguest notion that it even exists: It is likely to resist
all attempts to consciously cultivate it. Look at it directly and it
disappears. If you're trying too hard—or at all—you've probably
already lost it.
Game-show
host Bob Barker's entry into the ranks of Eldercool follows a slightly
different track. He and other older faces
became familiar to Generations X, Y, and Z thanks to their constant
presence on daytime TV. Earnestly (and endlessly) replaying their roles on
cable channels, stars such as Star Trek's William Shatner and Brady
Bunch mom Florence Henderson have forged second stardoms in more
ironic incarnations.
It helps not to take yourself too
seriously. Barker's coolness zoomed, for example, when he was portrayed as
a hot-headed lunatic who beats up dopey Adam Sandler in the 1996 comedy Happy
Gilmore. "Young men love that picture," Barker observes.
"They love to see an old gray-haired man rolling around in the grass
with Adam Sandler."
The payoff for Barker is that a good
portion of the studio audience for The Price is Right are
college-age kids who greet every new showcase of kitchen appliances with
rock concert whoops. "Many of them have actually told me that they
schedule their classes so they can watch The Price Is Right,"
says Barker. "I think some of them are majoring in it."
Similarly, Shatner, now 71,
specializes in amiable self-parody of his own hambone acting. His youth
appeal, like Barker's, is at least one part simple kitsch. But few can
deny that a gift for irreverence will endear one to the young.
In other cases, quasi-cool can arrive
due to shifting cultural forces, and yesterday's fuddy-duddy may wake up
to discover that he is considered a pillar of reassuring stolidity. Last
year's terrorist attacks brought about one of these sea changes, the most
striking evidence being the improbable ascendance of Donald Rumsfeld, the
no-guff 70-year-old Secretary of Defense, to "America's new rock
star," as The Washington Post declared in December 2001.
Thanks in part to Rummy's lively Pentagon press briefings, the heretofore
obscure Ford Administration veteran now boasts a multigenerational
following, complete with Internet fan clubs. In a national crisis,
hopeless squares like Rumsfeld and former New York City mayor Rudy
Giuliani morph into squinty icons of American resolve.
This transformation no doubt
heartened those who yearn for a general reasserting of traditional
authority figures, but it's likely to be a temporary phenomenon. In the
end, The Man isn't very cool, and neither are most establishment political
figures—unless they are former astronauts (John Glenn) or are otherwise
viewed as perpetual outsiders (John McCain). Secretary of State Colin
Powell has long topped many young Americans' lists of most admired
individuals, in part because his appeal transcends the strictly political.
Indeed, his attraction for younger voters is so great that he was wooed by
both major parties to be their presidential candidate. (Cooler still, he
refused them both.)
Few of us mere mortals are likely to
receive such dramatic validation of our own youth appeal. We won't get
Grammy awards or cabinet appointments or film cameos. But—if we don't
try to be anything but our true, best selves—we might just look out
across the generational battlefield one day at young eyes that see us with
a new appreciation.
Let's hope so, because along with
making life more fun, Eldercool seems to prolong it. "It keeps me
young to work with younger people," says Johnny Cash. He thinks back
on an all-star tribute concert held for him in New York City in 1999 in
which such artists as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and U2 paid him
homage. And for a moment his familiar baritone rumble—now raspy with
age—takes on a note of wonder, an acknowledgement that life still has
the capacity to marvel even a man who's seen it all.
"That was a kick, boy," he
says. "That was something."
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