[from an article on Bowie]
How David Bowie Avoided the Cliché of the Aging Rock Star
Bowie managed to resist the cult of youth that later trapped Mick Jagger and others of their generation.
By Marissa Brostoff January 21, 2016 New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/1281...ging-rock-star
before September 11, 2001, and the discursive shifts it entailed, cultural critic John Strausbaugh published a book that revealed perhaps more than it intended to about the politics of this mockery. Rock Till You Drop is a polemic with a simple thesis. “Rock is youth music,” Strausbaugh writes. “It is best played by young people, for young people, in a setting that is specifically exclusionary of their parents and anyone their parents’ age.” Much of what follows are bellicose descriptions cataloging the “horrifically aged bodies” of fellow baby boomers like Eric Clapton (“paunchy and chinless, bearded and burghermeisterly”) and
Stevie Nicks (“stuffed like a sausage into some girdle, her pancake makeup thick and hard as china”—perfect fodder, he snickers, for the drag queens who adopted her as an icon). Proudly though not inventively offensive, Strausbaugh uses age to legitimize the disparagement of bodies the world’s most conventional male gaze would prefer not to alight upon.