FEATURE:
Mirror Mirror
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna during her current Celebration Tour
Why Pet Shop Boys’ Claims Ageism in Music Doesn’t Exist Is Especially Ignorant
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MAYBE they are referring to the popularity…
IN THIS PHOTO: Pet Shop Boys (Neil Tenant and Chris Lowe)/PHOTO CREDIT: Alasdair McLellan
of albums by artists over the age of fifty but, in a new interview from The Guardian, Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tenant has suggested ageism in music does not exist. Maybe he was meant to say that records are timeless and, therefore, ageism doesn’t exist in terms of legacy and modern relevance. New albums by older artists survive decades, whereas artists like Pet Shop Boys are still hugely popular:
“Tennant famously worked at Smash Hits pre-Pets, and this begs a Hits-style question: what does their new album smell like? “That is a good Smash Hits question,” says Tennant. “It’s not citrony or sweet. I think it’s slightly more musky.”
Nonetheless is a marked development from their last Parlophone record, 2012’s beautiful but melancholy Elysium, a slightly defeated collection about becoming invisible as older men and musicians, also made in the wake of the deaths of Tennant’s parents. In 2022, the Pets helmed a Palace fashion advert alongside Joan Collins, now 90; a Loewe advert starring Maggie Smith, 89, recently went viral. Madonna, 65, is no longer lambasted for ageing, but triumphantly touring her Celebration retrospective. Have attitudes to older people changed in the past decade?
“Weirdly, music ceased to be ageist,” says Tennant, as various chocolate cakes arrive and the pair produce an astonishing amount of crumbs. “Young people are listening to their parents’ records. It’s all up for grabs.” He credits YouTube. “You could have a fond memory of seeing the video for Strawberry Fields Forever on Top of the Pops in 1967, and then you never saw it again. But I could look at it now. Something happened then. It all existed at the same time.” They crashed into this last year when Drake released a song with an unlicensed quotation of West End Girls, which Tennant found out about through a young nephew: “He was quite impressed, actually.” It got sorted after a cross tweet. “They were very helpful and apologetic,” says Tennant. Did they get paid? “Oh we certainly did.”
He ventures a theory. “I think pop stars have managed to do what we used to think only old blues musicians could do – turn into sort of ‘authentic’, classic … I think the public accept that. You could call it nostalgia, but I think it’s a desire to witness an authentic movement recreated. Age doesn’t seem to matter any more because the music doesn’t seem to have aged”.
It is incredibly ignorant to suggest that ageism does not exist in music. Maybe not so much for men but, for women, it is something that affects them. Chuck D recently spoke about ageism Madonna received during her Celebration Tour world extravaganza. Laura Snapes’ short-sighted assessment that Madonna is celebrated and not slammed because of her age is strange! So many people have taken to social media to troll her. She has received so much criticism for ‘not acting her age’ and trying to recapture the past. Even though the tour is wildly popular, its star attraction is not immune to ageism. Same for Kylie Minogue. Her latest album, TENSION, is one of her best. Even given her success and legacy, she has had to fight against ageism. Even though she has said it is not cool to be ageist now, that does not mean it’s non-existent! Minogue knows this. So how can we say music is not ageist?! BBC Radio 1 was accused of being ageist by James’ Tim Booth. Belinda Carlisle has also said she had faced ageism. Is it ambiguous when we look at the word, ‘ageism’/’ageist’. In terms of sound and relevance, I don’t think that the scene is obsessed solely with young artists and anyone over thirty is seen as washed-up and irrelevant. I do think that artists over fifty especially are still subjected to ageism and have to battle to get heard. This is especially true for women.
IN THIS PHOTO: Belinda Carlisle/PHOTO CREDIT: Nick Spanos/The Guardian
In terms of women over the age of thirty, there are artists fighting against dusty ageism. This post from 2022 suggests how there is a tide starting to turn. Even though there is a tonne of ageism still in 2024 – it is very much available to view online if you think it has disappeared! -, at least there is a bit more flexibility towards featuring female artists over thirty:
“The pressures of an industry obsessed with youth applies to both men and women, but of course with women it’s particularly brutal. The entertainment business – from music to Hollywood – has always fetishised the “ingénue” (just look at the backlash against Billie Eilish when she unveiled her new ‘womanly’ look on the cover of Vogue, age 18, or the vitriol directed towards a just-turned-18 Millie Bobby Brown when she started dressing sexy). It is profoundly depressing to think that Smash Hits reviewed a 35-year-old Madonna with the headline, “Calm Down Grandma!” in 1992.
And then there is the question of motherhood: record label bosses worried about investing in an artist who might only have a year or two before they want to have a baby, while singers like Paloma Faith and Jessie Ware have revealed how mercilessly inflexible the business can be for touring mothers.
Faith has revealed she knocked four years off her age (from 27 to 23) after she read an article that described KT Tunstall as old – at just 27. Anastacia said she was 23 when she was actually 30. As Madonna said in a 2016 speech accepting a Billboard Woman of the Year award: “In the music industry…to age is to sin”.
But, in the last two years, there seems to have been a shift, with a crop of female musicians breaking into the business in their thirties. Lizzo’s name-making sleeper hit Truth Hurts (originally released in 2017) entered the charts in 2019 when she was 31. Rina Sawayama released her breakthrough album SAWAYAMA in 2020 aged 30. And that same year Jessie Ware – who almost quit the music industry after becoming a mother – released the most successful album of her career, What’s Your Pleasure, aged 35. In January Priya Ragu made the BBC Sound of 2022 poll – a poll journalists use to identify each year’s shiny new generation of musicians – age 36. And Self Esteem – who used to lie about her age – was in February nominated for a Brit in the Best New Artist category at the age of 35, writing on Twitter, “In an industry obsessed the with youth of women, I’m galvanised as fuck by this.”
If the tide is genuinely turning, then I am relieved. Yes, youth and a breathlessly fast ascent is an easier story to sell (to my editor, to the reader, in a headline), but interviewing a young star is always hard work. Not only is it difficult to tease out anything particularly enlightening from the average teenager (and nor do you want to mine them for unprocessed trauma), I always feel a little concerned about immortalising opinions that will surely change three times over in the course of their early twenties through quotes that will forever sit somewhere on the internet. Last year when I interviewed a 17 year-old “viral star” on Zoom from the middle of his messy teenage bedroom, he seemed so vulnerable the experience genuinely felt wrong.
And I am relieved for their sake too. Fame is always easiest to navigate once you’ve already grown up away from the spotlight – you only have to chart the rise and fall of most Hollywood child stars to see why. Last week, Lizzo spoke to Vanity Fair about how her arduously slow route to success meant that “I was almost 30 when all this shit started popping up on me. I had a chance to fuck up as a teenager and in my 20s.… I’m so glad I had a chance to grow up and then get hit with all this shit”.
So many women in the music industry would argue how ageism is very much still around. Madonna has been slagged off and trolled. So many women over forty and fifty are still not played on playlists. BBC Radio 1 is not exclusively for younger artists, though there is still this segregation when it comes to stations and the age of artists. BBC Radio 2 playlisting ‘older’ artists and BBC Radio 1 for younger artists. I have heard from women in their forties and fifties who are given less airplay or taken less seriously because they are not in their twenties or thirties. The rise of TikTok artists and a wave of fresh and young Pop shows that there is still a preference for artists of a certain age. This suggestion music’s ageism has gone is very naive. It has distinctly improved. Not as rampant as it once was. Older women largely missing from festivals, especially the headline slots. I struggle to see how things have drastically improved. They haven’t. This year should be one where ageism isn’t a factor but, if you look at radio playlists, features, festival bills and beyond, you will see that the industry has an age block. It is one where women are still being victimised and ignored. If journalists are less obvious in their ageism, look at online comments and criticism of artists like Madonna and there is ageism all around. Nobody can argue against that – as there is ample evidence -, so there is no way ageism doesn’t exist. Maybe in terms of older artists having their music embraced, ageism is less prolific there. When it comes to attitudes towards older artists, particularly female performer, sadly, we have a very…
LONG way to go.