Popular Music

Table of Contents - May 2012 - Volume 31, Special Issue 02 (As Time Goes By: Music, Dance and Ageing)  

Articles

‘How we feel the music’: popular music by elders and for elders

Murray Formana1

a1 Communication Studies, 204 Lake Hall, Northeastern University, Boston MA, USA, 02115 E-mail: m.forman@neu.edu

Abstract

This article is inspired by the voices and perceptions of elder music fans and performing musicians, especially those older than 70 years of age. Based upon field interviews and ethnographic observations, it challenges the deleterious influences of social labelling and ageist perspectives (including casual yet damaging attributions of nostalgic yearning) that tend to delegitimise the musical interests or tastes of older citizens. By also emphasising musical performance, the article explores the active forms of music making as a strategy that mitigates notions of elders as non-productive consumers. The analysis further engages the contexts of musical performances within regulated institutional settings of assisted living residences, interrogating the logic and discourses of commercial management or State bureaucracies as they are expressed through organised musical recreation activities.

Murray Forman is Associate Professor of Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University. He is author of The Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and of the forthcoming One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Duke University Press). He is co-editor (with Mark Anthony Neal) of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge, 1st edn, 2004; 2nd edn, 2011).