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Forever Cool
By David Dudley
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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.
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