Feeling ancient

Which I'm not, but this was the weekend of getting to feel old. First of all, another couple of my acquaintance took the plunge at got married. Around the "cool kids" table, as I jokingly called it because it was sort of the punk rock table, where everyone was a musician or dating one, the topics of children, mortgage, marriage, and weddings we've been to all came up. Luckily, it was still the "cool kids" table so there was none of that so-when-are-you-two-getting-married crap. And hey, we're not all that lame. Other topics included why the MC5 should not be touring again and which musicians whose songs totally deserve getting reduced to cell phone ring tones (Depeche Mode) and which don't (Elvis Costello).
Earlier in the weekend, as we drove by our house-to-be, my boyfriend pondered out loud why it is that suddenly there's been a rash of bars in that neighborhood that appeal to the hipster crowd, i.e. people our age who listen to punk and indie, the more obscure the better. You know, the ones whose adolesence was defined by the music of the 80's and early 90's and were young adults when "alternative" music was finally sucked up by our corporate overlords. Spot 'em (us) by their thick-rimmed glasses, ironic T-shirts, sneaker choices that hearken back to the 80's (me: Converse, boyfriend: Vans), pearl snap button Western shirts, vintage dresses, and dark indigo jeans. (I'm not a bad indie poseur, though. I own exactly no ironic T-shirts or thick-rimmed glasses.) These have been the "cool kid"'s way of dressing for a decade plus, and it's hardened into habit. A couple of people at the wedding last night wore black shirts, and it's my guess that they just didn't own anything else.
Anyway, I digress. Why are there bars going up all over our new neighborhood that appeal specifically to that crowd? My theory was that our generation was aging, and we just don't have the energy to go downtown and party all night. Neighborhood bars with jukeboxes full of Joy Division and Johnny Cash have finally come into their own. Yep, we've moved on from hipsters to aging hipsters and the best proof of this is that our favorite hobby is sitting around sneering at those who are just a few years younger that have gotten into that nauseating "emo" music, which, as anyone with his wits about you pales in comparison to the excrutiatingly sad music of the 80's like the Smiths and the Cure, who managed to be insanely popular by not sucking.
Well, file this post on Alas, a Blog by Pink Dream Poppies under Confirming That We Are Aging Hipsters. It's well-written, don't get me wrong. And I like her take on things, but it made me want to crawl under my bed and suck my thumb. She wonders why older music is being recycled in newer music, and guesses it's probably just cyclical:

So that's my explanation for things: a bit of vague nostalgia mixed with a hindsight curiousity and a culture that's actively interested in recycling some bits from the eighties mixed with the simple fact that music these days is actually remarkably dull if you're a white kid who can't or won't like hip-hop. In ten years or so, if popular music is as dead as it is today, I wouldn't be surprised to see kids jumping around to a playlist that included Limp Bizkit and Britney Spears and Ricky Martin. At which point, I'll probably be standing around, looking at kids at a high school graduation party, saying to myself, "The fuck are they doing listening to this stuff?"

Let's hope not. My guess is that Limp Bizkit, etc. will go to the same dustbin of history that the crap that was actually topping the charts in the 80's went. I found this random list of shit that was popular in 1988, if that will help explain my meaning. Anyway, much of the music that is getting recycled isn't from the 80's, really. Garage rock is a 60's style, for instance.
Nonetheless, she's right that there is a hearkening back to the 80's going on right now. But I disagree that it's a market-driven thing, that the teenagers and young adults have some inexplicable craving for the years of bad cartoons, hairspray, designer jeans, and AIDS scaring the crap out of everyone. No, it's just that the musicians who are finally coming into their own now are in their late 20's and 30's and they are playing the kind of music they listened to while growing up. If people are playing punk, garage rock, post-punk and creaky 80's dance music retreads, take a look through their record collections and you'll see that they probably have all the original stuff in beaten and dirty c.d. cases.

*And for any of my friends who read this and want to snarkily tell me that I'm too young to count myself in the aging hipster category, well, I'm on the borderline. God knows all my friends are in the nefarious Gen X category. I think as long as you knew the pain of puberty before the Berlin Wall fell, you get in.
**For those who figure fashions are just cyclical, period, you definitely have a point. At the wedding last night(yes, I'm bringing it up alot, but it'd be hard to find a better collection of people 26-40 who are vaguely uncomfortable having to actually behave like adults), one of the guests showed up wearing a white shirt with his tie loosely knotted so that it falls a few inches below his neck. His entire ensemble went with the fashion, the sloppily tucked in shirt, etc. It was a fashion I found incredibly appealing when I was a kid, but now I find to be kinda silly. Anyway, I pointed him out to a friend and said, "Like it or not, the 80's really are back." She laughed and said, "Well, it was just a matter of time, wasn't it? These things always come back."