This post is the last in a series on the history of rock music.

It's 1992 and I'm 40 years old.  Appropriately enough, "Midlife Crisis" by Faith No More is my favorite song. I've moved away from my 1980s musical obsessions and am enjoying a few contemporary artists. Like just about everyone else, I own Nirvana's "Nevermind."

The group has a punkish appeal, but older listeners like it, too. Older. That's the category I have fallen into, much to my surprise. How did I get to be "older" so quickly?

Nirvana  represented the rough end of  punkishness. Throughout the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s and into the present, REM, with its folkish sound, has represented the smoother end of the punkish spectrum.

 REM is one of my all-time favorite groups, but by the 1990s, I wasn't claiming any one artist  as my current favorite.

By that time, I had heard too much amazing stuff to be able to claim a favorite.  I hardly ever have a favorite song anymore, one that I play and play.


But once in a while, it still happens. The most recent favorite song is "Sorry," a collaboration between Madonna and Paul Oakenfield. It's - what do you call it --  techno, house, trance?  No matter. As the Billy Joel song says, "the next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways, it's still rock and roll to me."
 
I think  my enthusiasm for rock music began to flag because I had reached the saturation point. I had already heard a lifetime of great sounds. But I continued to soldier on. I kept my eared glued to the radio until I was in my mid-40s.

A look at the CDs I acquired in the 1990s shows I was still a rock music fan. Among the artists from that decade I own are Live, Garbage, Oasis, Kula Shaker, New Radicals, Midnight Oil, Alice in Chains, Moby, K.D. Lang, Vertical Horizon, Foo Fighters, Barenaked Ladies, Counting Crows, Peter Murphy, Sam Phillips and the Dave Matthews Band. I did not become stuck in the Sixties.

Since the turn of the 21st century, I have to give credit to two musical mentors for preventing me from falling completely out of touch with rock music.  Both of them are female friends. Their  intense interest in  the music  -- and  their  ability to enjoy it with the head-banging abandonment of an adolescent male  -- is refreshingly uncharacteristic  of their gender and their ages (30s and 50s).  My son has also influenced me, but he's not  into  music the way I am.

Thanks to  my mentors, some of the artists I've enjoyed in the last decade include Eiffel 65, Beck, Death Cab for Cutie, Radiohead, Covenant, Front Line Assembly, Franz Ferdinand, The Dandy Warhols and The Killers. But I must give credit to my wife for introducing me to Coldplay. She and I still like some of the same artists - Enya, Loreena McKennitt and Clannad are examples - but we haven't been fellow musical explorers since the progressive rock era. Being parents  has been the main interest we've explored together  in recent decades.

The whole approach to owning  and listening to music has changed. Young listeners download it from their computers onto their i-Pods. They don't buy CDs with the same fervor with which  I once acquired vinyl LPs  and 45s. I  like the idea of the music I love being part of a collection you can touch and display in a special place. I like owning records that are now more than 40 years old. It's hard to live in a musical world where record stores are no longer important.  I love going to  Melody Records  and browsing - for vinyl and CDs. It's part of what it means to be a rock music fan

Maybe the music of the 2010s will be so riveting and unique that I will stop relying entirely on my mentors . But if that doesn't happen, I'm content to have lived in the era when rock was young and to have experienced so much magic.