Question for Musicians: At What Age Do You Lose Your "Cool"*

That's an eternity from now

 

Personally I couldn't care less about cool or what younger musicians think. It's all about whether or not you love playing. And I do. Always will. Probably til I drop dead.

 

Good luck with that.

 

????

 

Just wait...

 

I was still actively playing in the Boston/NYC club and/or recording scene into my late' 40s. I never noticed too much in terms of age discrimination. It also differs by genre. I played jazz for about 6-7 years from '96-'02 and it doesn't really matter a lick how old you are if your chops are still there. Same with the symphony orchestra. It would seem that the more serious the music, the less important the image, but that's a generalization, of course.

 

The day you stop connecting to modern music.

 

Fortunately we don't give a rat's behind about being cool, so its a bit of a moot point.

 

Wow, I guess I've been old since I was 12 or 13 then!

 

I've never been cool.

 

The moment you embrace look ahead limiting to stay relevant. You’ll be able to notice it when you declare that the loudness war is over or when you justify that 10-8dB DR isn’t too bad.

 

forced and feeble attempts at connecting to modern music are among the surest ways to expose the aging musician.

 

pretty much the age you start posting on these forums ...

 

if you're trying to be cool, you probably aren't anyhow but in terms of musician fans it seems to be around the time you have your first hit lol

 

Just wondering if there were any 50+ musicians here...

 

63 here.

 

: )

 

Quite a bit +, in fact.

I'll answer the original question two ways. I'll start with the negative.

I've always had more than one thing going at a time musically. Someone had an ad on craigslist not long ago, looking for a duet partner. The genre of music he was talking about doing was right up one of my (several) alleys.

He said something in the ad about hoping for someone who was in his age range. I took a chance and wrote anyway. I was upfront about my age, but listed in some detail all the things I thought I could bring to a collaboration of the sort he had put forth.

He never wrote back, which I thought was really bush league. It's fine if the age thing is truly a deal-breaker, but at least have the guts to say "Thanks, but no thanks."


The positive is this: there is nothing — absolutely nothing— that anyone could say to me in terms of me no longer being "cool" enough to play the music I love that could possibly outweigh the pleasure I still get from performing that music. That just won't ever happen.

 

gotcha...my post was with tongue in cheek...; )

 

I'm indebted to whoever the poster was who turned me on to this sticker several years ago:

 

Keith Richard always looked cool right up to the point he started resembling a chimpanzee.

 

Or Madonna.

I actually do sympathize with women performers more than men because of how hard it is not to sell your image with sex.

 

The funny thing is, now that I get older (44), not only do I not care about being cool anymore, I also wonder if a kid in his 20ies can be cool at all. You know, like a child acting cool? Cute but not cool.

 

Is this guy cool ?


Cause his guitar playing sure is.

 

When you spend a lot of time worrying if people think you're cool, you ain't, regardless of age.
Or you hit an age where you can see past your pecker, and get pretty smart, but cool? I don't know...
5 million standards in this fragmented world, so whatever makes you wake up the next day.