Is there a readier figure of fun in our culture than the aging rock star? The SoulCycle instructor and the urban farmer are more au courant targets. But not so long ago, during the Clinton presidency, before the jokes simply ran out, there was no better butt than the Rolling Stones embarking on yet another reunion tour.

Right before September 11, 2001, and the discursive shifts it entailed, cultural critic John Strausbaugh published a book that revealed perhaps more than it intended to about the politics of this mockery. Rock Till You Drop is a polemic with a simple thesis. “Rock is youth music,” Strausbaugh writes. “It is best played by young people, for young people, in a setting that is specifically exclusionary of their parents and anyone their parents’ age.” Much of what follows are bellicose descriptions cataloging the “horrifically aged bodies” of fellow baby boomers like Eric Clapton (“paunchy and chinless, bearded and burghermeisterly”) and Stevie Nicks (“stuffed like a sausage into some girdle, her pancake makeup thick and hard as china”—perfect fodder, he snickers, for the drag queens who adopted her as an icon). Proudly though not inventively offensive, Strausbaugh uses age to legitimize the disparagement of bodies the world’s most conventional male gaze would prefer not to alight upon.

But Rock Till You Drop has more up its sleeve than casual misogyny and homophobia. Its larger purpose is to skewer the legacy of the 1960s in much the same way that a slew of commentators—from liberals who still claimed the mantle of the left like Todd Gitlin, to hardened neocons like David Horowitz—had been doing since the Reagan administration. “The revolutionaries of 1968 grew up, grew fat, grew complacent, withdrew from the world, and beguiled themselves with their own trivia,” Strausbaugh writes. The revolutionary energies of the ‘60s were shams all along, a truth revealed by the fact that their bearers sold out. This line of reasoning is itself merely a continuation of the smug point Tom Wolfe began making in the ‘60s in his critique of “radical chic.” When radicalism has style, and the critic does not like radicalism, he accuses it of stylishness. When it used to have style, and that style has waned, he accuses it of ugliness.

The aging rock star, for Strausbaugh, turns out to be a cousin of the right’s favorite bogeyman, the tenured radical, who is despised for having the last good job in America while holding onto the rebellious idealism of the boomers’ boomtime youth. When an aging boomer says that rock is youth music, what he means is that resistance to the social order is natural and good when it is cordoned off in his own biographical and historical past—but foul, pathetic, and inauthentic if it attempts to be sustainable.

David Bowie was sustainable. For all his unearthly androgynous beauty, which seemed to place him out of time, he managed to resist the cult of youth that Mick Jagger and company built and were then entrapped by. The cult of youth created an encomium to live fast and die young, and many rock stars succeeded in this. A few—Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison—managed to do so before the ‘60s had fully burned out. Indeed, according to lore, their deaths were the end of the ‘60s. Their youth and the era of youth were coterminous. Their peers who survived had no such luck evading the youth cult’s contradictions. Having failed to cleave their bodies to history, aging rock stars embarrassed everyone who bought into the idea that rock and roll is inextricable from young flesh.