Loud Music, Bad Taste — And Loving It at 57

You're in the car, alone, and a song comes on that you have loved since you were seventeen. Loved in the way that involves a specific physical response, a slight increase in volume, and the brief but genuine suspension of the awareness that you are a middle-aged man in a sensible car on the way to collect something from a DIY superstore.

You turn it up. Considerably up. You may, if the traffic permits, do something with your head that could technically be described as nodding but that, if witnessed, would cause your children significant distress.

And here is the thing that nobody tells you, and that the cultural narrative around ageing and musical taste conspicuously fails to mention: it sounds exactly as good as it did in 1984. Not nostalgically good — not the bittersweet good of something that reminds you of being young — but actually, properly, sonically good. The riff is still the riff. The chorus still does what it was always designed to do. Whatever it was that grabbed you the first time is still there, fully operational, undiminished by the intervening decades.

Why the music of your youth still hits differently

The brain encodes music experienced during adolescence and early adulthood with a particular intensity, and the mechanism behind this is worth understanding, if only because it provides scientific justification for the volume levels your family objects to.

Adolescence is a period of heightened neurological sensitivity in which experiences are encoded with unusual depth and emotional charge. The brain during this period is undergoing significant structural development — the limbic system, responsible for emotional processing, is highly active, while the prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control and measured response, has not yet fully come online. The result is a nervous system that is wide open to emotional experience and encoding it with a force that the more settled adult brain simply doesn't replicate.

Music, which engages both the emotional and the reward systems of the brain simultaneously, is encoded during this period with particular vividness. The songs you loved at 17 are not stored as ordinary memories. They are stored as emotionally saturated experiences — connected to identity formation, to first relationships, to the particular intensity of experiences that were genuinely happening for the first time.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin — whose book This Is Your Brain on Music is worth reading if the science of musical response interests you — has described the period between 12 and 25 as the reminiscence bump for musical memory: the window during which musical experiences are encoded most deeply and recalled most vividly across the lifespan. The music you loved during this period is not just stored more effectively than later music. It is stored in neural structures that are connected to identity, emotion and reward in ways that music encountered later in life typically isn't.

Which is why, at 57, the opening bars of something you first heard at 17 can produce a response that the carefully curated playlist you discovered at 42 — however objectively superior — simply doesn't match. The 42-year-old music is good. The 17-year-old music is wired directly into the emotional core of who you are.

The identity function of musical loyalty

Here is something that the people who raise an eyebrow at your musical preferences haven't considered: the loyalty is doing important work.

Musical taste is not merely an aesthetic preference. It is, particularly for men, a significant component of identity — a way of locating yourself in relation to culture, to history, to other people, and to a particular version of yourself. The man who still listens to the music of his youth is not failing to grow up. He is maintaining a connection to an identity that was formed during one of the most formative periods of his life, and that the music carries in a way that almost nothing else does.

The psychologist Adrian North at Curtin University has spent much of his career studying the social and psychological functions of musical preference, and his findings on the identity function of musical loyalty in middle age are instructive: men who maintain strong identification with the music of their youth tend to show higher levels of personal identity continuity — the sense of being recognisably themselves across the changes of adult life — than those who have allowed their musical preferences to be entirely replaced by whatever is culturally current.

There is, in other words, a psychological coherence argument for still loving the music you loved at 17. It is not regression. It is continuity.

The fact that the music in question may involve a guitar being treated in ways that most acoustic engineers would describe as aggressive, or vocals delivered at a pitch and volume that suggests genuine structural distress, is — from the identity continuity perspective — entirely beside the point.

The bad taste problem

Now to the more delicate matter: the quality of the music itself.

Because here is where honesty is required. Some of the music that men of a certain age love with undimmed ferocity is, assessed by any defensible critical standard, not good. Three chords played loudly by people who are clearly having more fun than their ability strictly warrants. Lyrics that would embarrass a sixth-former. Production values that suggest the recording budget was primarily spent elsewhere, possibly on the rider.

And yet. The critical apparatus that produces the verdict not good is assessing the music against standards that are largely irrelevant to what the music is actually doing, which is activating a set of neural pathways associated with identity, reward and emotional intensity that more technically accomplished music may entirely fail to reach.

The neuroscience of musical pleasure is clear on this point: the brain's reward response to music — the dopamine release that produces what researchers call chills or frisson, the physical response of the hair standing on end or the involuntary physical movement — is not reliably correlated with technical complexity or critical merit. It is correlated with personal meaning, emotional association and the particular neurological wiring described above.

The music doesn't have to be good. It has to be yours. This is not a defence of all musical choices. Some things are objectively terrible in ways that no neurological justification redeems. But the gap between critical consensus and personal response is, in the context of music, a gap between two entirely different evaluation systems — and the one that produces the response in the car on the way to the DIY superstore is considerably more personally relevant than the one operated by music journalists.

The critical establishment has very strong opinions about what constitutes good music. The dopamine system has very strong opinions about what produces the response. These are not the same committee, and they frequently produce conflicting recommendations.

Volume as a psychological phenomenon

The volume question deserves attention because it is not arbitrary. The preference for loud music — specifically the loud music of one's youth — is partly physiological. Hearing sensitivity declines with age, and the frequencies that carry much of the emotional impact of music are among those most affected by age-related hearing loss. The man who turns it up is not simply being anti-social. He is, in part, compensating for a genuine perceptual change.

Your long-suffering family

There is a legitimate argument that music, which was designed to be played in venues where everyone was voluntarily present, at volumes that required earplugs among the more cautious attendees, is not optimally suited to the domestic environment. That the kitchen at 8 am on a Saturday is not, acoustically or socially, equivalent to the Hammersmith Odeon in 1987. That other members of the household have preferences that exist and are valid.

These arguments are correct as far as they go. The correct response — and the one that maintains both marital harmony and musical integrity — is the car, the shed, the headphones, and the occasional concert with people who were there the first time and require no explanation.

The concert dimension is worth dwelling on briefly. The reunion tour, the anniversary gig, the reformed band playing the album in full — events that receive considerable cultural mockery as exercises in nostalgia for people who should know better — are, in the research on live music and wellbeing, among the more effective social and psychological interventions available to men in midlife. A 2019 study by O2 and Goldsmith's University found that attending a live music event produces significant increases in feelings of wellbeing, self-worth and closeness to others, with effects lasting up to two days.

The methodology of that particular study has attracted some academic scrutiny, and it was funded by a venue company with an obvious interest in the conclusion, so it should be held with appropriate scepticism. But the broader evidence on live music, social connection and psychological wellbeing is more robust, and the specific experience of being in a room full of people of your own generation who are all having exactly the same response to exactly the same song at exactly the same moment is — whatever its critical merits — a form of collective experience that produces genuine social bonding.

The fact that everyone in the room is twenty-five years older than the last time they were all in the same room for this purpose, and that several of them are now wearing sensible shoes, does not diminish the experience. It arguably deepens it.

The hearing protection question

An article on loud music and middle age that does not mention hearing protection would be irresponsible, so here it is: wear hearing protection at concerts.

Not because the music isn't worth the hearing damage — that is a calculation each man makes for himself — but because age-related hearing loss and noise-induced hearing loss are additive, and the man who has been attending loud concerts since 1982 without ear protection and who is now 57 is likely to be experiencing the compound interest on several decades of acoustic investment.

The technology has improved dramatically. High-fidelity earplugs that reduce volume without distorting the sound quality are widely available and, unlike the foam cylinders previously associated with hearing protection, do not produce the experience of listening to music through a mattress. Eargasm, Etymotic and similar brands produce musicians' earplugs that are used by professional performers precisely because they protect without compromising the experience.

The broader point

The man who still loves loud music at 57 — who turns it up in the car, who goes to the gig, who maintains the conviction that certain guitar sounds are objectively correct regardless of what anyone else thinks — is not refusing to grow up. He is not in denial about his age. He is not embarrassing himself, or not in ways that require correction.

He is maintaining a connection to a part of himself that is genuine, that is neurologically grounded, that serves psychological functions worth serving, and that provides a form of pleasure that is both harmless and evidence-based in ways that more socially approved leisure activities sometimes aren't.

Keep it. Turn it up. Consider the earplugs. And if anyone objects, refer them to the neuroscience. It won't convince them, but it will give you something to say while the next track loads.