Why music from your teen years is so powerful

[michael hagerty]

Overt the last 20 or so years here on RD, I’ve mentioned the theory of Peak Musical Awareness (PMA), which gained traction when I was programming music radio in the 70s. Basically, it said that for most people (your mileage may vary), the ages of 16-22 where when the greatest awareness of pop music took place.

Now, there’s some scientific research. The dates have shifted slightly, but the concept is the same.

Essential pull-quote:

“Research suggests that after about twenty-five, the window narrows. Not because the brain stops learning, but because the type of learning changes. The brain shifts from building foundational identity structures to refining and maintaining them. New music can still be pleasurable. It can still be meaningful. But it arrives at a house that’s already been framed, wired, and roofed. The music of adolescence arrived while the foundation was being poured.”

Psychologists explain why the songs you loved between thirteen and eighteen feel more emotionally powerful at sixty than anything you've heard since — it's not nostalgia, it's how memory and identity were being built simultaneously - The Expert Edito

The songs that shaped you at fifteen didn't just soundtrack your youth — they became permanent architecture in the brain you were building at the time, and no song heard after twenty-five can replicate that construction.

experteditor.com.au

 

[davideduardo]

This is a very significant subject for all programmers.

As many know (and I am prone to repeating) I ran the in-house research division of HBC/Univision Radio for many years. One of the things we did not do was "focus group" as we preferred individual in person interviews that had a flexible structure. An advantage was that people do not usually talk about personal feelings in a group setting.

I was often the moderator of those sessions with our listeners. One of the strong findings about music is based on a common subject expressed by listeners: "my time in high school" or "my time in college" was when I was "the happiest I have ever been". Most common, though, was reference to that 15 to 19 year-old era in listener lives (in part because not all persons went to college, or those years required working at a menial job while attending college).

Of course, further discussion would bring out that the music of those years gave a good feeling because it was attached to those "Happy Days". (I had to say that....).

The "experts" quoted tend to talk about brain development and maturity and the like. My finding was simpler, based on the music perpetually being attached to those "best days of my life".

In fact, in one seminal interview nearly 30 years ago, I was talking to a women who worked in a sub-basement archive at one of the Washington, D.C. government agencies. She filed papers all day long. It was boring and tedious. But when she listened to the oldies station we were doing the study for, she became that happy kid in high school. It was not about specific memories being triggered (although some songs did do that, too!) but about the mood.

Spanish has a word, "añoranza" which embodies feeling a deep, fond, memories; not just "recalling" but actual and almost physical "feel". That is what I sensed in that interview, and what I recognized when others, over the years, told me about how those songs from those teen years made them feel.

So I would say that this in no about "building a permanent architecture in the brain" but about the feelings attached to what, for many, was the best period in their lives.

This type of "happy recall" also explains why some people are very attached to those songs from their youth, and why others may have moved on. I often (but by no means always) saw that people whose lives got better and better over the years as they became adults were often less passionate about or focused on oldies than those who really loved their teen years the most.

 

[amos1001]

in other words, if you ask a person "what year did you graduate from high school?" and then name a popular, chart topping Top 40 song from that year, the person is likely to say "oh i love that song!"
many years of un-scientific research by me has confirmed this.

 

[ted chittenden]

Here I am, the outlier again. The music I relate to the most was written and recorded between late 1966 and mid-1972. Were there songs I liked after that? Yes! And were there songs I liked before that! Yes!

But what makes me an outlier here was that I was born in the summer of 1963. So, my favorite music came out between the time I was three years old and the time I was eight or nine.

Why, you may ask. I didn't think so at the time but I now think that my late mother got it right when she was asked by one of her friends why I was so close to the radio. What she said was that my father always had the radio on when he was puttering around in the garage, fixing up the scout. In the early days, he had it on KHJ or KRLA. (Later, he migrated to KBBQ then KLAC.) Since we lived in a small house with the garage not far from it, I was always hearing the music playing from my dad's radio. Oh, he never let me near it until Thanksgiving of 1970 but I heard it just the same.

The ending date is just as important. For mid-1972 (in July, to be exact), was when we moved from Los Angeles to Phoenix. From a day school for the blind to a boarding school for the deaf and blind where, more often than not, I was the odd boy out was where I went in the fall and nothing was the same ever since.

And while I kept track of American Top 40 since 1975 (so much so that I brailled the top 20 every week from the spring of 1979 until the spring of 1983), my favorite songs, even today, mostly lie between late 1966 and mid-1972 and that is probably where they will stay until I pass.

 

[tall_guy1]

in other words, if you ask a person "what year did you graduate from high school?" and then name a popular, chart topping Top 40 song from that year, the person is likely to say "oh i love that song!"
many years of un-scientific research by me has confirmed this.

Yes, but it depends on the music people liked during those years. If you never get attached to it, it does nothing then and nothing now, but if you like the music its different.

 

[radiophiler]

Great article and topic.
I think the age range/years for favorite music varies based on a number of factors. Two I've thought about: How old were your parents during your youth and did you have older siblings?
Ted mentions above that his dad had on pop music stations during his early years. I was also born in 1963, but my parents didn't have that music on. They were 35 when I was born. The kitchen radio was tuned to the local MOR station in the 1970s. The stereo in the living room was tuned to either classical or "beautiful music." My parents had little tolerance for then-current 1970s/early 1980s music. I had friends whose parents were more like Ted's ... they were younger parents, more likely to have on a station playing current music. If a kid's parents were 23 when the kid was born in 1963, in 1973 the parents were still just 33 ... younger than my parents when I was born!
Also I had no older siblings. I had a cousin who was born within a month of me. She has an older brother. Her musical tastes always ran earlier than mine ... my theory is, it was because of her older brother playing then-popular music in the house.
If I had to pick core years for myself ... I'd say 1979-1985, when I was 15 (before my birthday in 1979) to 22 (the year I finished college).

 

[vchimpanzee]

I'm at outlier as everyone knows. There is some music I enjoyed when I was a teenager which I still enjoy, just because I thought it was good. This was the era of disco and soft rock artists such as The Carpenters, James Taylor, Glen Campbell, John Denver, Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond. Beutiful music was played in stores, restaurants and offices and I liked it. I was not happy in high school, or college. And a lot of the newer style music I heard while in college I disliked a lot because it reminded me of the big changes I was about to go through and didn't want to go through. Older style of softer music I heard during those years I liked just because it was good to me.

Ironically, some songs I don't even like (or didn't) make me feel good when I hear them even if I didn't think I was happy in college. I don't know why I would have good memories if I wasn't happy. But that's what happened with "Der Kommissar" by After the Fire and "I Want You to Want Me' by Cheap Trick.

A lot of country music I like was recorded in the 80s or 90s. But over the years I discovered many songs recorded before I was even born that I liked. Then there were other songs I would have been old enough to hear on the radio but just didn't discover until years later. Many of the songs i like I never heard before the 90s.