General Music Discussions

Intellectually, the age of a performer should be completely irrelevant to how much the album impresses me. The album sounds how it sounds whether the person was 20 or 70. It's not a sonic factor so it should be about as pertinent as the colour of their hair.

Yet in practice this isn't the case. People beat up Orchid by Opeth a bit and I find myself repeatedly going "But they were only 21. Orchid is pretty damn great for 21. Yeah if they'd been 35 it might've been a bit sad but for 21 year olds to write and play like that isn't too shabby."

And just now, relistening to the Jethro Tull discography, I went through Aqualung going "Ian Anderson was only 24. While other people are still in their night clubbing frat house mentality, he was putting My God and Wind Up together."

There's lots of other examples too.

It makes me question the principles on which we evaluate music. Can a non-sonic factor like age can genuinely make an album more or less impressive? Or is it distracting backstory that doesn't matter at all?

See also Beethoven composing while deaf.