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Music

Why Are There So Many Old Dudes Performing at Primavera Sound?

You don't need to look far to know that the current musical climate is consumed by nostalgia. Festivals and oldster musicians have both benefited and contributed to the phenomenon.

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“Holy shit,” the wasted Brit next to me shouted in disbelief, directly into my ear, while gesturing roughly in the direction of rave pioneer Andrew Weatherall, who was DJing about 20 feet in front of us. “He’s fucking 50, innit!”

Weatherall’s actually 52, and he’s far from the only performer at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival who’s roughly twice the age of the perplexed Englishman beside me. At that point I’d already seen Giant Sand, The Replacements, Spiritualized, and Sunn O))), all of whom are fronted by people over 40, and I’d close out the night at 5 AM to Detroit house veteran Richie Hawtin. Elsewhere on the weekend’s bill are Thurston Moore, Patti Smith, Sleater-Kinney, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Julie Ruin, Ride, The Church, and a number other acts who’ve been in the game for 20 years or more.

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You don’t need to look much further than your local Urban Outfitters to know that the current musical climate is consumed by nostalgia, abetted by the Internet, which has made once-rare records that used to require intensive crate-digging to hear now available at a click. Festivals and oldster musicians have both benefited from and contributed to the phenomenon. Fans have proven willing to pay big money to see long broken up bands reunite (especially if they’re playing a classic album in its entirety), enough to get convince musicians to get over the most calamitous and bad-blooded of breakups, as proven by the Pixies’ extended victory lap. And nostalgia has become a key element in the festival business as a whole, which encourages fans to go deeper down their musical rabbit hole of choice.

Ironically, all the countercultural scenes that all of these acts came up in were highly suspicious of aging, especially the ones that came after the Sex Pistols’ epic flameout solidified punk’s live-fast-break-up-young ethos. Not overstaying your welcome was a point of pride in the indie rock scene that’s in the process of reuniting en masse. Now Thurston Moore, who once urged listeners to kill their idols, seems happy to get on the nostalgia circuit and play to loads of people who love Sonic Youth but probably wouldn’t recognize a lick of Chelsea Light Moving.

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On the other hand, a lot of these older acts are really, really good, and on the first day of Primavera they honestly kind of owned the place. Sunn O))) is only properly heard on the kind of massive sound system that wouldn’t fit into the size of venue they normally play, and you could hear their monolithic drone all the way over at the stage halfway across the Parc del Forum where James Blake was playing. Weatherall and Hawtin guided the proceedings into a ravey late night mode with the expertise that comes with several decades worth of experience in turning crowds up. And the Replacements have managed to convert the absurdity of being a bunch of old dudes playing in a rock band into its own kind of punkness, and capably blew buzzy young guitar slingers Viet Cong out of the water.

(Not to say that old people were the only good stuff happening. Barcelona’s The Suicide of Western Culture pumped out a compelling and very au courant blend of techno and krautrock. The set by Polish duo Rebeka was the most fascinating synthpop performance I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. And disco revivalists Jungle probably got the crowd more amped up than any other act of the day.)

The worrying aspect about the influx of older acts into the festival business is the possibility that they’ll push deserving younger acts out of one of the more important income sources in the current music industry climate. With record sales cratering, touring’s become an essential component to making a living as a musician, and the summer festival circuit in Europe and North America is basically eating the concert industry as a whole. Getting left out of it could prove fatal to the careers of younger acts.

Then again, excessive nostalgia is a problem that tends to correct itself, and the newfound acceptance of middle-aged musicians into the counterculture could easily end up playing itself out if the younger people who the festival business depends on decide that they’ve had enough. Some of them already have. While a couple of thousand people happily and respectfully raved to Weatherall’s set, the drunk British guy crowding my space made a belligerent call for modernity. “This is shit,” he bellowed at Weatherall. “Play something new!”

Miles Raymer is a young dude. Follow him on Twitter.