The band are younger than me????!!!

For me the band that shocked me by being my youngers were The Replacements (especially, of course, Tommy). I'll also never forget when I noticed I was older than the Playmate of the Month.

How old is Karen O?

Even though Autechre are older than me (I believe Sean is 32, Rob is 34), when I first found that out (they were 21 and 23) I was shocked at how young they were. This sort of thing happened to me a lot with techno artists in the early-mid 90's. It seemed as though everyone had been around forever, yet they were still so young (of course, they had been, because they all started when they were like 18). I'll never forget that day in 1995(?) when I found out that Joey Beltram was only 24.

cue too much joy's "train in vain": "the playboy centerfold is younger than me..."

2. Happy Mondays. I'd just assumed this. Found out I was wrong.

3. Pulp. Found that Jarvis was about a year younger. Still safe.

It seemed that for the longest time, 'new' bands were ones that had plugged away without effect for ages, then 'hit'. So the general effect was muted by that.

The first time it actually happened, it was probably the Senseless things, and in any case I still felt like a young person, so the actual age difference didn't matter (I looked young for my age).

Now, it matters not to me.

If I had grown up, I wouldn't be here.

;-)

(Though I was quite indignant when I saw a profile of Ben Lee this spring that suggested he was still 21. Um, not unless he was 10 when he wrote that Even Dando song, and he was not quite *that* precocious.)

Avril Lavigne was first inspired to pick up the guitar after hearing Matchbox 20. They made her want to express herself artistically.

At I was first shocked. Then angry. Then denial set in. Then came acceptance. Then appreciation. Then booze. Then Jesus.

Also, I just remembered something specific: I found out recently that Fiona Apple is, like, three days younger than me. THIS is depressing, because she's been famous for years and years.

On the plus side, I am not anorexic and I never said anything really stupid on national TV. So there's that.

Avril had been singing folk and country her whole life. Once she got a record deal, she started edging toward rock, and the record company was only too happy to help push her in that direction.

So maybe M20 made her want to play rock music, but they didn't inspire her to "express herself artistically".

my bad! still makes me feel old as fuck.

I think that it's going to be worse when I realize that I'm old enough to be the PMOM's father.

Oh, that's sweet.

I already know about Franz Ferdinand -- all but the bassist are older than me, and the baby-faced bassist is actually less than a year younger than I am (Same routine as with The Bravery, BTW.) And the next-youngest member is two years older than I am, so I'm still feeling REALLY comfortable in my FF fanhood. (You have to remember that I'm used to being a fan of bands whose members are at least 18 years older than I am. Need I give you an example here?)

Come to think of it, there's only one member of The Killers (yeah, I love them too -- got a problem with that?) who's younger than me and he's actually two whole years younger! Which really isn't that big an age gap. SIX years would be a HUGE age gap to me, but only because of my present age; I'm sure I won't feel the same way when I'm, like, 40 or something.

Anyway, like I said, I'm used to listening to artists who are DECIDEDLY older than I am; with the exception of the whole "quiet is the new loud" thing that I became enamored with in the millennial era, all the artists whom I listened to over and over again up until ca. 2003 were artists who were biologically old enough to be my parents. So it'll be really odd for me to become a huge fan of an artist only to find that the band members were born when I was in high school or something crazy like that. (As for now, though, these people are about 7 - 10 years old right now, so that provides me with a temporary reprieve from oldsterdom. Oh wait.)

He was 13!

I thought he was somewhere around there, which makes him one or two years younger than me. Not five. (Yes, this is a goofy thing to be indignant about, but I never claimed to be ungoofy.) Mostly I just think it's weird when people who are still quite young claim, or allow their publicists to claim, that they are even younger.

niave nobody, you just need to avooid the Trachtenburg family Sideshow Players and Smoosh, or whatever that band with the two sisters is.

So I still continued to spend many years completely unconcerned about how old anyone in a band was for many years, always assuming that they couldn't be more than a couple of years younger than me.

Then Ash came along (who admittedly, were very young at the time) and called their album 1977 - not as a some sort of reference to UK Punk's Year Zero, as I originally assumed, but because that was the year the horrid little tykes were born, thus making them a full 14 years younger than me.

The jumped-up little bastards.