YouTube, ageing and PJ Harvey: An ‘everyday’ story of the erasure of age

Abstract

Ageing is starting to matter in popular cultural studies but the matter of ageing within YouTube is, at present, unwritten. This article is an attempt to start that process. YouTube hosts the music video for PJ Harvey’s single release The Community of Hope (2016) . Shot by Seamus Murphy, it shares screen space with official music videos from Harvey’s 23-year career. Raising questions about the relationship between her past and present, this article examines the link between YouTube and ageing through two concepts, repetitive circularity and the flat archive. These rely and inform each other in a process that prioritizes the presence of youthfulness through the absenting of age, whereby the ageing body is erased from a popular cultural forum. YouTube’s ‘wallpaper of the past’ has a nagging impact on how we might read the body’s progress through time, in particular, how it ages. Tackling the paucity of work on ageing as it surfaces within the changing topographies of popular music encounters, the article considers how ageing is presented within a digital environment such as YouTube and concludes that the story is one of age erasure.

An Ever Present Past

“…As with those artists, he has not just played with representations of himself, both younger and older, but at times quite literally re-presented his age through both his music and the visuals that so often accompany that work. The "repetitive evocation" or "circularity" of McCartney's past, his youth, complicates the "linearity of the aging process" (Gardner 2019(Gardner : 1162, not just for himself but for his audience and their perception of his personawhat Philip Auslander defines as "a version of the musician designed for public performance" (2019: 91) and its role in their collective identity. In the final scene of his music video for the 2021 version of "Find My Way", from his album McCartney III Imagined (Capitol 2021), for instance, a digitally de-aged Paul McCartney reaches to the back of his head, pulls off his mask, and reveals himself to be album collaborator Beck (Paul McCartney 2021b).…”