Two recent accounts of “older” rock artists has me thinking about the pushing of rock’s older narrowly defined presumptions about age.

There was a time when it was a truism that rock culture was only for the “young,” defined as those in adolescence and young adulthood. Many theologians today, in academic and pastoral work, still make that presumption based on the codes of their own upbringing and the moral strictures of their job descriptions (that is, to peel people away from “childish things” and into “real faith”).

The trouble is that rock as a youngster’s (or even “young man’s”) game does not adequately describe what is happening in the multiple scenes of secular music in general or of rock in particular today. The two accounts I mention above focus on Yoko Ono and Peter Gabriel, both of whom are reinventing their earlier music (what the industry calls “back catalogue” or simply “catalogue”) and writing fresh music past age sixty. (And in Ono’s case, well past 70.)

The music journalist Jon Pareles has both stories: he reports on Ono in concert recently here, and on Gabriel here. “Desperate and exposed”  and “deliberately exposed” is how Pareles describes Gabriel’s and Ono’s performances now. There are new collaborators, lyrics old and new, and voices sanded by time but wisely fuller in giving still what they used to promise: Gabriel’s wayfaring introspection, Ono’s proffered ingenuousness.

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