17 January

“The Fab Four's music endures because it mirrors an era we still long for, says Adam Gopnik.” Yep, nostalgia. There’s a new Beatlemania right now, major films from Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and now Sam Mendes. Major world tours from surviving Beatles. We live in a rapidly ageing society, and this is their idols. That’s my greatest objection to gig culture, full of millionaire (billionaire) rock stars now in their 80s, pretending to still be 17. In the 1960s and 70s this was youth’s way to force a space for themselves in a wider adult culture. It’s ridiculously naive to think it was mostly about music. It did that, but now those same youths are in their 80s they’re using this same format to maintain their now high status in the culture. What about today’s young? One of the responsibilities of age is passing the baton. Doing things that better reflect your stage of life and responsibilities to society. And that doesn’t mean having new bands and new acts. That cultural space is the space of 60 years ago now, that revolution is long over. No changes come to societies now from singing songs. The problem is there is very little adult culture left, for them to take over. The transition to an adolescent culture replaced adult life with teen life. These same octogenarians said, in their youth, that they hoped they died before they got old, and some actually did. It was also a culture of eternal youth, and still is. Others said it would be ridiculous to be rock stars beyond 60. Then they got to 60, realised eternal youth was incompatible with ageing, and just kept going. It’s all they knew, the boomers were the first generation to try to re-make adult life with teen culture, that they learned in schools. Ironically the same refusal to grant a place in adult society that fuelled the band-driven revolution of the 1960s, is one that generation now seemingly refuses to see in its own young. Complaint or claims of injustice are met with condescending sneers, and outrage at any criticism. Nothing changes really in history. The disaster is that previously children entered adult life, without being allowed to be children. Now adult life is child-life, nobody is allowed to be an adult.