YOUTH CULTURE Beware the nostalgia of a new Golden Age BY ALEXANDER PROVAN

We worship youth. American culture is one of commerce, and, in turn, commerce is the culture of America. The dream of liberty and the unfettered pursuit of carnal pleasure can be sustained only by a youthful notion of entitlement and an equally youthful expectation of fulfillment. Neil Young was 24 when he recorded Harvest. Since then, the greeting card section in your local Wal-Mart has pushed the "Over the Hill" age threshold lower and lower. Young, who recently released Greendale, an ambitious rock opera, is probably one of the few "older" people with a positive perception of aging. The American Psychological Association recently found that such people can expect to live an average of 7.5 years longer than those who begin writing their own epitaph the day they receive a membership card from the AARP.

While Young never laid down his guitar, there are plenty who took his advice and chose to burn out rather than fade away. My shelves are littered with records that attest to the fleeting nature of artistic inspiration, or more likely, artistic relevance. Blame it on the increasingly short lifespan of the commodity, the music industry’s reliance on churning out next big thing after next big thing, and radio’s complicity. Regardless, rock and roll has never been the arena of the aged. Popular media plasters the blown-up, airbrushed images of those under-clothed and between 16 and 25, and we rely on these figures to provide us with full-fledged images of our own desires.

Either the counter-trend is radical or I’m too young to know better, but it seems we are increasingly relying on the elder statesmen and women of rock to provide us with images of our own pasts, whether real or idealized. The popular and critical enthusiasm for the latest, and arguably greatest, crop of reunions and revivals might be traced to a sort of collective vertigo. How long can we endure the reign of form over content? If popular music represents the way we experience the world, is it surprising that, at this juncture, many would reject it?

The golden age is here again, as a compilation: Television, Love, the Pixies, Mission of Burma, MC5, Brian Wilson, the Stooges, and Wire, among others, are back, not to mention the myriad bands that worship at the altar of these recently awakened giants. Those of us whose formative musical experience was Nirvana’s Nevermind have been living vicariously through the records of the past, counting each Frank Black solo record with a tally mark on our collective prison wall, awaiting the second coming.

That said, there is something dangerous about the return of the repressed, a monumental caveat somewhere in the fine print on the receipt for each $40-$85 ticket, or the back of each $25 Pixies’ T-shirt. If relevance means having something to say about the way we experience the world, then the Pixies lost that more than 10 years ago. Frank Black is planning to tack a CD of re-recorded Pixies songs onto his next solo record. Mick Jagger’s left thumb still moves with more animation onstage then the entire band. It’s hard not to wonder if being so excited about seeing the Pixies, and every other band I never got to experience the first time around, is an indication that, I, too, at the tender age of 21, am getting old.