WHY DOES THE MUSIC OF OUR YOUTH SOUND SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE MUSIC OF TODAY?
"As I plod through my 20s, I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon: The music I loved as a teenager means more to me than ever—but with each passing year, the new songs on the radio sound like noisy nonsense. On an objective level, I know this makes no sense. I cannot seriously assert that Ludacris’ “Rollout” is artistically superior to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” yet I treasure every second of the former and reject the latter as yelping pablum. If I listen to the Top 10 hits of 2013, I get a headache. If I listen to the Top 10 hits of 2003, I get happy."
Not my words, but the words of Mark Joseph Stern in 2014. No doubt there are some 26 year-olds who now regard Roar as the greatest song ever recorded. Most of us who are no longer teenagers have a visceral instinct to preference the music of our teenage years stretching into our early 20s. I say “most of us” because some people do make a concerted effort to keep up with what’s happening as music evolves.
But why is this? Why does the music of the past hold us in its vicelike grip? It’s time to take a medium-sized dive.
A MEDIUM-SIZED DIVE
Let’s start by taking a look at how music is processed in the human brain and body.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that triggers sensations of pleasure and well-being. As your brain becomes familiar with a particular song, your body gives you a dopamine hit upon hearing just the first few notes of the song. Serotonin and oxytocin are also released. It’s the same as taking cocaine, only legal and cheaper. If you’ve ever been at a wedding in Australia and the first few bars of Nutbush City Limits are played, you might have noted an unseemly rush of boomers stampeding towards the dance floor. Our bodies actively anticipate pleasure upon hearing familiar notes.
There is even a controlled trial, so to speak, which can bear this out. Science has documented numerous instances of people who suffered brain injuries and lost their ability to distinguish melodies but retained the ability to recognize the emotion conveyed by music. Researchers noted that these patients had sustained damage to the temporal lobes of the brain, a region involved in comprehending melody; their frontal lobes, which play a role in emotional regulation, were unaffected.
Music is complex; it involves rhythm, melody and harmony but also pitch, tone, and much more besides. Its complexity means unravelling and interpreting it is good for the brain. According to a study published in the scientific journal Brain, adults who suffered a stroke and listened to music daily experienced significantly greater gains in verbal memory and cognition after two months than stroke survivors who listened to audio books and those who didn’t listen to either music or books on a daily basis.
The very act of processing music in the brain is both emotionally and rationally beneficial.
So, music is important to humans, the science concurs. But why does the music of our youth continue to mean so much more to us than the music of today? It’s time to turn you into an instant expert.
ANCHORING: THE FIRST TIME IS THE REFERENCE TIME
Between the ages of 12 and 22, there are many rites of passage that become deeply embedded in our memory framework because we are doing them for the first time and thereafter we frequently return to them in our minds. In fact, what we end up remembering is the memory of a memory of a memory and so on.
Everything seems more important in teenage years because you are doing it for the first time. Your first kiss, falling in love, taking alcohol, taking drugs, what you learn, the people you meet, the ideas you form, the films you watch, the books you read. And, of course, the music you listen to. A 1988 study found that 93 percent of vivid life memories concern unique or first-time events.
It’s what psychologists call “anchoring”. Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast Thinking Slow, noticed that if a student’s first essay was good he assumed they were a good student and tended to give them the benefit of the doubt if future essays were less impressive. And vice versa for a poor first effort. The first exposure to something becomes the yardstick against which other ideas are judged.
Next, let’s talk about hormones.
THE HORMONAL SURGE
During the mid-teen years hormones are running rampant as boys and girls turn into men and women.
As teenagers, we are at our most vulnerable to changes in our neurological pathways because that is when, along with our very earliest years, we go through our greatest development. Music is a very emotionally charged sensory stimulant that affects our limbic system and prefrontal cortex. Therefore, our brain pathways for the rest of our lives really are shaped during puberty and adolescence.
There is some research to show that girls are more fixated on the music they first hear between 12 and 14, and for boys it’s 14 to 16. This accords with the pubertal surge difference between the genders. Not disconnected is “first boyfriend or girlfriend syndrome” You never forget the first relationship you have and you never forget the first time you heard THAT song. Many people can even recall the exact time and place where they heard THAT song.
Speaking personally, I was a late developer and had my teenage surge between 16 and 18. This may account for why I became especially attached to the music of The Fall, Joy Division and the other post-punk outfits as they were the bands peaking between 1978 and 1980. The fact that I didn’t get a girlfriend until I was almost 19 may also mean that the rather angsty music of these bands reflected the intense emotional difficulty of those times. Maybe. Or perhaps I was just a grumpy teenager.
Next, let’s look at the social aspect.
MUSIC AND SOCIAL IDENTITY
Music may not play quite such a dominant role in teenage years as it once did on account of the myriad competing distractions for today’s teenager. However there’s still no escaping it. Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, notes that the music of our teenage years is fundamentally intertwined with our social lives. For the insecure teenager it is extremely important to belong to an identifiable social cohort. There is safety inside the tribe and danger outside.
I remember going up to university and playing Television’s Marquee Moon when I was serving behind the college bar. The first conversation I had with Nigel, my friend of 43 years, was about the album. It turned out his brother was secretary of Television’s UK fan club. One of the in-crowd from the year above discovered I’d seen The Associates live and was impressed. My friend Lewis and I used to play games of Owzthat between his favourite musicians and mine. It took me quite a few years to get over my suspicion of anyone who liked Spandau Ballet or preferred The Style Council to the Jam. And so on. Music formed my social identity.
“We are discovering music for the first time when we’re young, often through our friends. We listen to the music they listen to as a badge, as a way of belonging to a certain social group. That melds the music to our sense of identity.”
Thus speaks Petr Janata, a psychologist at University of California–Davis. She agrees with the sociality theory, explaining that our favourite music “gets consolidated into the especially emotional memories from our formative years.”
Next, the uneven distribution of memories.
THE PEAK-END THEORY AND THE REMINISCENCE BUMP
Finally, we have what is sometimes called the reminiscence bump. According to Katy Waldman, -
Autobiographical memories are not distributed equally across the lifespan. Instead, people tend to experience a reminiscence bump between age 10 and age 30 (with a particular concentration of memories in the early 20s), and at any age, a vivid period of recency from the present waning back to the end of the reminiscence bump.
According to the reminiscence bump theory, we all have a culturally conditioned “life script” that serves, in our memory, as the narrative of our lives. When we look back on our pasts, the memories that dominate this narrative have two things in common: they’re happy, and they cluster around our teens and early 20s. Why are our memories from these years so vibrant and enduring? Researchers at the University of Leeds proposed that the reminiscence bump coincide with “the emergence of a stable and enduring self.”
I’m not entirely convinced that the reminiscence bump is any different from what Kahneman would describe as “peak-end theory” or “peak-end bias”. According to this, people remember the highs and lows, intense and extremely memorable times. They also remember the lasting feeling of what has happened most recently. Everything else gets filtered out.
Life is at its highest and lowest before we become our stable adult selves. It’s a little like a see-saw that gradually stabilises when there’s no one pushing it down. The music associated with the highs and lows becomes the music we remember most vividly, because music is primarily emotional and can’t be disentangled from those times.
You might ask why the music we heard last week isn’t as memorable if the theory covers both the peak and the end of an experience. Perhaps the answer to that is firstly that most of us simply stop listening to new music. And secondly if and when we do, it only serves to remind us of music we used to listen to, rather than providing a new and lasting memory. Or … we dismiss it as noisy nonsense.
SUMMARY
So, let’s pull all that together.
1. The first time we hear something becomes the reference point to which we return again and again. It’s called anchoring.
2. Life is intense during our mid-teen hormonal surge and the music we listen to then assumes disproportionate significance.
3. Early on, music gets wrapped up in social identity. And sociality is again disproportionately important to young people who need to identify with a tribe for the security inherent in belonging to something bigger than themselves.
4. Distribution issues. According to the theory of the reminiscence bump our memories of late teens and early twenties tend to be happier and remain more vivid. This is also connected to the theory of peak-end – memories are not evenly distributed. So the music we listen to is not evenly distributed in our memories either.