Age-old problem of the pop song
John Walsh takes issue with new research which says that many popular lyrics are ageist
Sad news that Sir George Martin, the Beatles’ sophisticated, wise and brilliant musical guru and record producer, died this week at 90. Radio 4’s Today programme closed with the final moments of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – the end of “A Day in the Life” when all the strings and guitars and special effects get madder and more cacophonous before they burst into the glorious clarity of that final chord, played simultaneously on four pianos.
It was magnificent. I feel like celebrating the maestro right now, with one of the songs he produced. Which one? How about “When I’m 64?” But be warned: if you play it, make sure there are no elderly people in the room. Because it’ll only upset them and ruin their “confidence and selfesteem” and their mental and physical health and leave them blubbing, wrinkled wrecks. At least that’s what a report in the new Journal of Advanced Nursing maintains. It comes from the Anglia Ruskin and Hull Universities, and claims that pop songs which convey “negative connotations of growing old” can affect older people badly. A team led by Jacinta Kelly, senior lecturer in nursing, listened to umpteen songs, from the 1930s to the present day, which dealt with age and ageing issues.
They found 76 songs (is that all?) of which 56 showed old age “in an undesirable way”. In the article Ms Kelly singles out a lot of, well, singles: they included “When I’m 64”, “Those Were the Days” by Mary Hopkin, “Because Of” by Leonard Cohen and “Old” by Dexys Midnight Runners. Ms Kelly wrings her hands about them: “It’s not a trivial issue. Pop music is inescapable – you hear it in the elevator, when you’re out shopping, everywhere – and some lyrics can make old people feel like outcasts.”
I don’t know when I last heard such a tin-eared approach to song lyrics. Reading about these academics interpreting lyrics is like watching a baboon on the Masai Mara inspecting a Stradivarius. Do they not realise, it’s not about random mentions of deafness or decrepitude, but what the song makes of them? Can anyone listen to “When I’m 64” (written by Paul McCartney when he was 15) and hear anything but a jolly knees-up in which a chap asks his girlfriend, with a wink, whether she’ll still love him when he’s as old as his grandad? His reference to “losing my hair” is balanced by the breezy assertion that he’ll still be “staying out ’til quarter to three”, and the whole song is a celebration of togetherness in retirement, with all the gardening, knitting, cottage-renting and grandchildren-dandling that goes with it. It’s sweet. And it’s not about dying, for God’s sake, it’s about undying love.
And what of “Those Were the Days”, that old Russian folk song, about jolly times in the “tavern” when everyone was young, romantic, pissed and certain that life will be a riot of success, money and sex? Would it really depress an elderly listener that the singer returns to the “tavern”, sees her reflection and thinks, “Was that lonely woman really me?” Because, five seconds later, she says: “Through the door there came familiar laughter/ I saw your face and heard you call my name/ Oh my friend we’re older but no wiser/ For in our hearts the dreams are still the same” –a familiar cliché about being eternally “young at heart”.
Bringing Leonard Cohen’s name into the argument is a spectacular own goal for Ms Kelly, because no-one has done more for the image of the passionate old man who still appreciates female beauty and sexiness, and celebrates both in his lyrics, aware of the ambiguity of his adoration: what are they chances that they’ll adore him back? “Because Of” is a tongue-in-cheek masterpiece of confession:
“Because of a few songs/ Wherein I spoke of their mystery/ Women have been/ Exceptionally kind/ To my old age... They become naked/ In their different ways/ And they say,/ ‘Look at me Leonard,/ Look at me one last time’/ Then they bend over the bed/ And cover me up/ Like a baby that is shivering”. The baby image at the end is unsettling. But the song is full of intimacy, and Cohen is surely saying that, whatever it takes – sympathy, admiration, wanting to be the last beauty seen by this connoisseur of female flesh – at least it still brings the women.
Cohen should be recommended as a tonic for the old, because he writes so well about the joys of age. In “Closing Time”, he and his doll are drinking and dancing a lifetime away (“And my very sweet companion gets me fumbling, gets me laughing/ She’s a hundred but she’s wearing something tight”) before “The Boss” turns on the blinding light of death and stops it all. In “Slow” he celebrates taking it easy – not because you’re old or dying, but because it’s better that way: “All your moves are swift/ All your turns are tight/ Let me catch my breath/ I thought we had all night/ I like to take my time/ I like to linger as it flies/ A weekend on your lips/ A lifetime in your eyes.”
It’s noticeable that younger singers don’t body- swerve the subject of age and maturity, but embrace it as a rich learning curve. Pete Townshend’s 1960s rallying-cry in “My Generation” – “Hope I die before I get old!” – was eloquently countered by Robbie Williams’s “I hope I’m old before I die.” Ed Sheeran’s world-conquering “Thinking Out Loud” starts: “When your legs don’t work like they used to before, And I can’t sweep you off of your feet...” and assures his babe that their love won’t ever change a scrap.
Perhaps the Anglia Ruskin people might celebrate such eternal sentiments, rather than wasting their time looking for mentions of hair loss and elastic stockings in the lyrics of Parnassus.