Previous researchers who have studied how older adults are portrayed in popular culture have focused on film, TV, and children’s books. With some exceptions, the messages we receive from popular music about older adults and aging have been largely unstudied. In the current study, we sought to (a) understand what manifest and latent messages were being conveyed about older adults and the aging process in popular music and (b) describe who was communicating those messages. We found older artists were not represented on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 song lists from 2016 to 2019 that were analyzed for this study. Furthermore, after conducting a content analysis on the lyrics of our sample of 400 songs, we found the following concepts related to older adults and aging discussed: glorification of youth, “the end is upon us,” “running out of time,” “what will we do when we get old,” generativity and wisdom, and young men “reppin’ for that low life.” The majority of the songs had no direct references to age. When aging was referenced, it was predominantly negative, reflective of age-related stereotypes prevalent in society today. Suggestions for how educators can use the deconstruction of age-related messages in song lyrics as an engaging and time-effective teaching tool are discussed.
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