NY Times: Music tastes are formed at 14

Interesting. I do wonder what His Bob-ness would have ended up doing if he'd been 14 years old today.

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Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, an occasion that essayists, bloggers and magazine writers have been celebrating for weeks. Mr. Dylan surely deserves the attention, but he’s only one in a surprisingly large group of major pop-music artists born around the same time.

John Lennon would have turned 70 last October; Joan Baez had her 70th birthday in January; Paul Simon and George Clinton will reach 70 before the end of this year. Next year, the club of legendary pop septuagenarians will grow to include Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Brian Wilson and Lou Reed. Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia would have also been 70 in 2012.

Perhaps this wave of 70th birthdays is mere coincidence. There are, after all, lots of notable people of all ages. But I suspect that the explanation for this striking cluster of musical talent lies in a critical fact of biography: all those artists turned 14 around 1955 and 1956, when rock ’n’ roll was first erupting. Those 14th birthdays were the truly historic ones.

Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.

“Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,” says Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of psychology and the director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University. “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.”

Biography seems to bear this out. When Robert Zimmerman (the future Bob Dylan) turned 14 as a freshman at Hibbing High School in Minnesota, Elvis Presley was releasing his early records, including “Mystery Train,” and Mr. Dylan discovered a way to channel his gestating creativity and ambition. “When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Mr. Dylan once said. “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.”

Mr. McCartney, the son of a big-band musician, abandoned his first instrument, the trumpet, after hearing Presley. “It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music,” Mr. McCartney has been quoted as saying. “When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ ” — which was released in 1956, when Mr. McCartney turned 14 — “I thought, this is it.”

The timeline of music history is dotted with such moments. A hundred years ago, the model for 20th-century music took form with Irving Berlin’s popular appropriation of the black music of the day, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The song sold more than a million copies on the platform of its time, sheet music. The year was 1911, when three future innovators of vernacular, cross-racial music — Sidney Bechet, Jimmie Rodgers and Fletcher Henderson — all turned 14.

In 1929, when the singer Rudy Vallee mastered and exploited the emerging electronic technologies of the microphone and the national radio broadcast to become a progenitor of an intimate, naturalistic style of singing derided by adults as “crooning,” both Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra turned 14.

When the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, the 14-year-olds (or soon to be) who were around to experience pop music’s new superstars included Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Gene Simmons and Billy Joel.

I can’t help wondering what a 14-year-old with Mr. Dylan’s gifts and hungers would have done if he had been born three or four years earlier and had hit his teens when pop music was in its pre-rock lull, anesthetized by the over-sugared tunes of Teresa Brewer and Vic Damone. Back then, the drive-ins raged with cool pulp-movie delinquents, like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” Would Mr. Dylan, a movie nut in childhood, have gone into screen acting to channel his rebellious spirit?

Every age makes its own kind of genius. For hints of what the cultural giants of the future will be doing in their own time, we’d be well served to look in the ninth-grade lockers of today. Perhaps one day we’ll witness the transmutation of social networking into an as-yet-unimaginable kind of art — 140-character sonnets or mash-ups of media we haven’t heard or seen yet. Whatever we’ll be celebrating as the legacy of the 70-year-olds of 2067, it will surely belong to the 14-year-olds of 2011.

David Hajdu, an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.”

 

Interesting. Unfortunately, i turned 14 in 1977. Hadju's book is recommended, BTW.

 

I read the NYT article yesterday.

I guess 14 is a magic age ... it was for me, in many respects.

 

Within them dwells the Forest's mighty God, And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic

I turned 14 in 1969. That was the year my Hippie mom gave me a copy of Sibelius' Tapiola as performed by the Berlin Philharmonic directed by Herbert von Karajan. Had all sorts of unintended consequences.

 

His "Ten Cent Plague" book on the horror-comics "scandal" of the Fifties was excellent...I have to check out the "Positively Fourth Street" one.

The 14-years old theory is interesting. It must have been strange to be the last generation to grow up WITHOUT rock n' roll; I can't imagine not hearing my first rock song until I was 14 or 15 years old.~!!

I'd say that in large part my music tastes were set at age 14 (1984)...however that was before I was into Steely Dan, John Coltrane, or The Grateful Dead, and all three became huge influences on me. I think some artists (Sinatra, Steely Dan, Miles Davis, Coltrane, etc) you kinda have to be a bit more mature to grow into.

 

I turned 14 in 1979. At the time I was more into Lizzy, ELO, Pink Floyd and Supertramp than anyone else. Rappers Delight and Blondie to me sounded better than The Clash, The Pistols and The Buzzcocks, although I liked the Boomtown Rats.

 

VERY interesting. Now that I think about it, although I liked music before the said age, I realized that I began to really pay attention and appreciate it by the age of 14. It was even a lot more personal to me during that time. I connected those tunes to my life at that time and has made me VERY nostalgic for that era because of it.

 

14 in 1974. Maybe that is why I have always been such a big Kiss fan. I was just too stupid to realize the music was just a show........

 

I wasn't, and I was born 2 years after you!

 

Obviously you didn't hang with the cool people........

 

In one of his comedy specials, comedian Chris Rock said that for the rest of your life, you will always like the kind of music you were listening to around the age that you started to get laid.

 

Could be some truth to this theory. I'll always love the stuff I was into at 14.

 

I was 15, September 2009, the month I got into the Beatles. This was when I became interested in music.

 

I turned 14 in 1990, and by then I had already been into what I was gonna get into for a several years. My tastes were already in place. A steady diet of 60's oldies and 80's heavy metal. I slithered out of my mother's filth holding The Beach Boys' Endless Summer and a Sgt. Pepper 8-track.

 

I don't listen to anything I did at 14 thankfully.

 

Typical newspaper bunk. Every person is different. There are lots of kids whose taste for music is formed before age 14 and others way after. All depends when you are exposed to the music that moves you.

 

I think the difference is that I grew up in NYC (where everybody was cool), and you didn't.

 

As it happens, I started getting seriously into music at 14.

 

I turned 14 in the summer of 1973. I was way into music years before that, but what a time to be that age and discover all the stuff coming out that now qualifies as 'classic' and most of which is still loved by most members here to this day.

I am thankful to have been born in 59.

 

I was a huge music fan starting with the British Invasion, but turned 14 in 1968; John Wesley Harding, Music From Big Pink, The White Album, Beggars Banquet... I could probably survive happily on a desert island with just those four.

 

Worked for me. I was introduced to a heavier level of jazz,after some popjazz like Ramsey Lewis, in 1965,as I turned 14.Still plays with me and Ramsey sounds just fine in so many different settings.In fact,I find that when buying used vinyl,not much grabs me past 1980.After starting a family in 1972,money spent on new music was few and far between and I find myself playing catch up or buying pieces I had to get rid of for rent money back then.Also,getting nto a bit of older jazz(20s-40s)'cause of the quanity,quality and prices for this stuff.RCA France black & white series can be had for $1-3 around here,as well as more than a few of the Vintage Series,usually a buck.

 

1969, Stones, Let It Bleed, "Honky Tonk Women" - that sounds about right. Although the ages of 18 (1973, NY Dolls and Mott the Hoople) and 21 (1976-77 and the beginnings of punk) are equally important in my musical development.

 

Kind of close. I turned 14 in 1989, and although that was probably when I first became conscious of popular music, I didn't get into it. I've decided after the fact that it's because pop music wasn't very good at the time (it was still the thick of the hair-metal era), but I wonder if that's just making myself retroactively smarter than I actually was.

I made some friends in high school who were into R.E.M., got into them too to get along, then the whole alternative rock thing happened in 1991 (Nirvana, etc.) when I was 16 and I really, really got into rock music. I think that's helped my perspective. I was able to hear a lot of great music happening in the present between the ages of about 16 and 19, but I was just old enough to know that it hadn't always been this good, and it probably wouldn't always be that good, either.

 

Too true! I went to my first show on my 14th birthday in 1995, NOFX at the Stone Pony, NJ. That was the same year I got into punk, alternative, etc, and basically listened to music on my own terms, as opposed to what was mainstream at the time.

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This is more true for me.