Prepping for the Rock/Soul/Progressive class tomorrow, and these words in James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin once again got my attention:

Meanwhile, most of my friends (discounting those who have continued to make their living by writing about, or recording, popular music) long ago stopped listening to rock. As they settle into middle age, their old albums gathering dust, their current musical tastes are now attuned to quite different styles of music, from country-western to classical, from show tunes to patriotic women’s choruses from Bulgaria–almost anything, in fact, but the once beloved soundtrack of their adolescence and early adulthood.

Okay, Dr. Miller, here’s my confession. I’ve never understood the behavior you say your friends exhibit. I feel as intensely about this music now, in my middle age (I don’t remember “settling” into this phase, but sure, I’ve arrived here), as I did when I was an adolescent, or even as a child. I was grabbing a quick bite at a local fast-food joint today when “Ticket to Ride” and “In the Midnight Hour” came on back to back on the store’s music system. I did not flashback to my childhood, relive a primal scene, or even feel the delicious memory of my first kiss. No nostalgia need apply. (Some music does make me powerfully nostalgic, but that’s not why I love it. Sometimes it’s a reason why I avoid it.) No, I thought about the musicians, in a space, making those sounds, sounds I can inhabit and sounds that inhabit me, a set of sounds whose structure in the passion and urgency and agency of their delivery connects me to a wild surmise about the possibilities of meaning, joy, and deep embodied insight in our mortal lives.

Then again, I was moved in exactly the same way by Bach and Hank Williams and Rodgers/Hart, too. From the first.

Why would one stop listening to anything one has loved? Unless one didn’t truly love it, but simply got rushed along in the herd, it makes no sense to me. And it makes me skeptical about James Miller’s argument that “unlike every other great genre of American pop, rock is all about being young, or (if you are poor Mick Jagger) pretending to be young.”

Maybe I didn’t get the memo telling all those poor intense saps that all the passion they felt in adolescence would one day gather dust, just like their old rock records. Me, I’ve got my old rock records filed right next to my new ones, by format, in alphabetical order, and I play them all regularly. Methinks Miller doth protest too much.