Can youth ever be old? I am not quite sure. Pop culture seems to be feeding us conflicting ideas on the matter.
There are 19-year-olds in anti-aging and wrinkle cream commercials, but we have people in their late 20s and early 30s playing teenagers on television dramas. What gives?
I heard the Verve Pipe’s “Freshman” on the radio this weekend on the oldies station. That song was released my freshman year of high school. It can’t be old yet. If it’s old, does that mean the class of ’01 is already over the hill?
Apparently the shelf life of a song is only as long as radio listeners can stand it ad nauseum, usually about a month of every third song slot rotation. Then it’s old. This is funny because a song off the same album that goes into rotation after people get tired of the first song will be billed as the new song from artist X. How can one song be old and one song be new off the same album?
While I am on the subject of music, where does music go when it is old? When is the last time you heard an Elvis or Beatles song on the radio? Their plays are getting few and far between. They aren’t even on the oldies stations anymore. This is sad. There will be a whole generation of Americans who don’t know who they were or how influential they were to the music of today.
I am fully aware that the Beatles were before my time and I can’t really be nostalgic about a time and place in which I didn’t even exist. That doesn’t mean I won’t hoard their music to bestow on the younger generations.
You can’t be a current of future music lover and not have heard “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Strawberry Fields.” Still, where does this “if it’s not new, it doesn’t exist” attitude come from?
Maybe the shelf life of pop culture packets is cyclical. Seniors in high school today don’t know who Nirvana is but they own a “new” Popple, Cabbage Patch Kid or Care Bear.
Toys we played with when they were new went out of style and came back with vengeance.
The same thing has happened with our cartoons. Remember Jem and the Holograms and G.I. Joe? Episodes of these and other “old” cartoons are now a hot commodity on DVD and on television. I saw an original Ninja Turtles cartoon on the other day and it made me wish for those days when I carried a Splinter lunch box.
Other things never come back in style. Boy bands tend to have a terminal shelf life while other artists like Will Smith and Madonna are like Twinkies. Lord help us if The New Kids on the Block ever get billed again.
All I can make out of this muddle of pop culture is at 20 years old we are decrepit and we should spend lots of money to recapture our youth and buy products to make us look younger. Society is always looking for younger, better faster versions of everything, including people. Society’s answer for this is consumerism. This is ridiculous. If all this worked, America would be a nation of 2-year-olds. Who wants to be a 2-year-old again? Certainly not I.
What can you do? Ignore it. Ignore the people telling you that you are not hip, with it or stream lined enough. What are we, sports cars?
Here is my gift to you: Nirvana is still cool. You aren’t old and wrinkly. You are under no obligation to sport a Care Bear T-shirt. You have my permission to laugh and point at people who don’t know who Ringo Starr is.
So go listen to some “old” music and watch some “new” TV while reveling at the elasticity of your non-product drenched skin.
Adrienne Howse is a junior communication major. She can be reached at [email protected].