Not Going Gently: Artists Innovating After 60

Rock and roll is a young man’s game. The Beatles ran their course before Paul and George even cracked thirty, punk rockers like Johnny Rotten and Ari Up dropped their most famous work while teenagers, and the notorious “27 Club” is a brutal reminder of who evaded fading away by burning out.

But while even the most radical go the Jimmy Buffet route and sail off into the nostalgia circuit (looking at you, Dead Kennedys), a select few battle against the clock to stay up with the times. Join us as we walk through some of the best rock stars not going gently into that good night.

Robert Smith

Where were you when you found out that The Cure released an album in 2024?

Against all odds, goth pioneer Robert Smith wrote eight songs in his iconic style and released them under The Cure name as Songs For a Lost World just last year. The Cure’s spacey production is just as spectacular as ever, and Smith’s voice has held up surprisingly well.

But while the sound is familiar the innovation is in the lyrical content. Smith goes to darker, more personal places than ever before. On “All I Ever Am” he sings My weary dance with age/ and resignation moves me slow/ Toward a dark and empty stage/ Where I can sing the world I know.

On “I Can Never Say Goodbye” he sings about shadows getting closer to him, and on the sobering closing track, “Endsong” he strips back all poetry, letting you know exactly how he feels about the passage of time.

And I’m outside in the dark staring at the blood red moon/ Remembering the hopes and dreams I had and all I had to do/ And wondering what became of that boy and the world he called his own/ I’m outside in the dark wondering how I got so old.

Kim Gordon

A 70-year-old white woman from Rochester drops a hip-hop album in 2024. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but the woman is Kim Gordon, the co-mastermind behind eternal innovators Sonic Youth. She’s one of the brightest minds in music, a fantastic composer, and a performer who knows her strengths and weaknesses intimately.

The opening track of The Collective, “Bye Bye” blasts with the repetitive high-hats and over-blown bass you’d hear blasting from a teenager’s car. But she doesn’t dare rap, instead, she talks-croons over the beat in her, playful style.

It doesn’t take long before the song is filled with the catchy but challenging industrial noises that made her a legend. The second track opens up into the type of low-fi beat you’d hear in the early underground work of 90s Memphis hip-hop acts like Three Six Mafia. The album isn’t a one-trick-pony gimmick and it’s clear Gordon has done her homework.

Nick Cave

Nick Cave has been dancing around religion for years. Songs with the Bad Seeds thirty years ago like “Lay Me Low” use religion as an aesthetic; later tunes like “Into My Arms” read as an agnostic prayer, and ever since the tragic death of his son in 2016, his belief has felt more and more real (particularly on 2019’s Waiting For You, and 2020’s White Elephant.)  In 2024, he cranked this up by releasing a full album of gospel-rock songs, Wild God.

On tunes like “O Wow, O Wow How Wonderful She Is,” he perfectly mixes the rhythms of the centuries-old genre with his battle-tested grasp of the ballad. He even ups the ante by using contemporary production tactics. Quiet auto-tuned vocals lay a harmonic bed that sounds like a postmodern barbershop quartet and mouth percussion is edited to sound like a more serious version of the human beatbox. These experimental, playful tactics combined with the painfully reflective lyrics about the death of an old lover create one of the best songs of the 2020s and one of Cave’s best ballads

Bonus: Beth Gibbons

Trip-Hop pioneer Beth Gibbons just hit 60 on January 5th of this year, meaning she had to have been younger than 60 when she recorded her comeback Lives Outgrown. But the 2024 album is so forward-thinking it shouldn’t be left out on a technicality.

The second track, “Floating on a Moment,” is an impressionist rock ballad, replacing chords with sparse arpeggios. Gibbons intones grim poetry about aging and death that can’t help but contain her signature romance — exemplified on the Portishead track “Glory Box”.

A song like “Oceans” takes on a simpler beauty. The magic of Portishead was always mixing a sort of erotic French Chanson (a la Serge Gainsbourg) with hip-hop beats. “Oceans” strips back the production and presents Gibbons’ voice in all her Euro-styled glory, at times recalling a Jaques Brel song.

As Beth has entered her sixties, she’s re-earned her spot as one of the best innovators in music.

-Christian Flynn

Photo: Robert Smith with The Cure, 2019 (Mr. Rossi via Wikimedia Commons)