Does Musical Genius Have an Expiration Date?

The ’90s grunge scene burned bright, then burned out. Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Mother Love Bone, Mad Season, Screaming Trees, and Silverchair are all gone. Bush, one of the few survivors still standing after three decades, gave us Sixteen Stone and Razorblade Suitcase, two records that helped define the era. However, the British rocker’s latest, I Beat Loneliness, lands like a damp firecracker. The album arrives fully formed yet utterly lifeless, ambitious in scope but unable to spark.

This is the sound of creative entropy.

The decline follows a depressingly familiar pattern. Music history is filled with acts who, after brief periods of success, spend decades drifting between competent mediocrity and outright irrelevance. But this is not just the result of fading talent or complacency. It’s about the fundamental nature of different art forms, and why some reward age while others punish it.

Consider the painter’s trajectory. Monet was going blind when he painted his greatest masterpieces. At seventy-three, cataracts reduced his world to a blur of shapes and colors. Many artists would have retreated but the Frenchman pressed on, turning fading sight into sweeping, shimmering scenes. His focus on the natural world reached its height in the vast water lily panels that now surround visitors at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Unlike his earlier landscapes, these towering, immersive works carry a quiet, meditative power. They dissolve horizon and depth, drawing the viewer into an endless field of shifting form. Years of refinement taught him what to leave behind.

In literature, the arc often follows a similar pattern. Philip Roth’s early novels burned with sexual charge and manic wit, but his writing often lacked discipline. By his seventies, he was producing Everyman and The Plot Against America, works of exactitude and resonance. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, written at seventy-three, distilled the apocalypse into sparse, biblical prose. It was a feat he likely couldn’t have achieved in his twenties or thirties, when the weight and restraint it required were still out of reach. In his final years, Tolstoy shifted from the epic scale of War and Peace and Anna Karenina to the moral precision of Resurrection, a novel shaped by decades of reflection. With The Brothers Karamazov, his final work, Dostoevsky fused philosophy and human drama with a depth and clarity only a lifetime of experience can provide. The same enduring truth plays out on screen.

The same time-tested truth plays out on screen. Mickey Rourke, once a handsome lead in forgettable fare, was nearly undone by years of fighting, failed surgery, and scandal. The Wrestler, at fifty-six, turned his battered face into the perfect map of a man clawing at redemption. Jeff Bridges spent decades as Hollywood’s affable everyman. Although The Big Lebowski, arguably his most famous film, is a cult classic, it limited his ability to be seen beyond its stoner-philosopher persona. Then Crazy Heart, at sixty, revealed a voice worn by regret and hard-earned wisdom. It was a role only a seasoned actor, someone who had truly known love and loss, could inhabit with such gravitas. Adam Sandler, long dismissed as a lightweight, poured his nervous energy into Uncut Gems and Punch-Drunk Love. The result was a work far darker and more electric than his early comedies ever achieved. Olivia Colman rose from light comic parts in Peep Show and Twenty Twelve to an Oscar at forty-five. She portrayed Queen Anne with pettiness, fragility, and a wit so sharp it felt personal, not performed.

In the above art forms, time tempers the blade. An actor’s late performance distills a lifetime into a single breath. A painter’s last work holds every mistake and triumph that came before it. A novelist’s final book carries the echo of every line they’ve ever put to page. In these artistic arenas, age becomes an asset, not a liability.

Music operates by different laws entirely.

Popular songs demand almost instant opinion, often within thirty seconds. They live or die on impact. This gives youth a built-in advantage, when emotions burn hottest and the energy to channel them feels endless. The body matters here in ways that it doesn’t for writers or painters. Vocal cords lose elasticity, lung capacity fades, and power notes that once tore through arenas now sit just out of reach. Even the most disciplined singers can’t fight the basic physics of age. Range narrows, and the upper register – once a weapon – becomes a gamble. It’s why almost every great rock singer eventually lowers the key, rearranges the setlist, or lets the crowd handle the high notes. Bush’s Gavin Rossdale is no exception. Nearing sixty, he simply cannot hit the same peaks he reached in the ’90s.

The sharper decline is neurological. The brain’s appetite for novelty peaks in the twenties. This is when neural pathways are still forming at high speed. Young musicians absorb influences from every direction, fusing them in ways that feel effortless. They borrow without fear, experiment without worrying about market fit, and chase instinct over caution. This is when defining albums are born, before commercial pressures and personal history start steering the wheel, and before the pressure of a career makes every move a calculated one. Once that reckless synthesis fades, no amount of technical skill or experience can fully recreate it, because the wiring that made it possible has changed.

Today, streaming means that most popular recordings ever made are just a click away, erasing the buffer that once gave new works the room to breathe. A fresh Bush single doesn’t just compete with what’s charting now; it stands shoulder to shoulder with Everything Zen from 1994. The comparison is immediate, and almost always unforgiving. Youth’s raw energy is hard to ignore when placed beside the pedestrianism of age.

This creates a paradox unique to popular music. Other arts can live outside the tyranny of the present. A painting from 1965 can still find first-time admirers. A novel, decades old, can meet new readers without losing impact. Many songs, though, are tied to the moment that birthed them. They carry the slang, codes, and rhythms of their era like genetic markers. When that era passes, they shift from a living force in the culture to a vessel of memory.

Fine art can survive on small circles of loyal patrons, but popular music relies on mass appeal, and mass appeal skews young. Record labels see aging acts as assets in decline, radio avoids artists whose core audience has moved on, and streaming algorithms reward the instant hit over the slow build.

This leaves established musicians facing an impossible choice. They can reinvent themselves, risk alienating existing fans, and likely lose their place in the market entirely. Or they can repeat successful formulas, ensuring new work will be received as faded fragments of past glory. Most choose repetition. The result is albums like I Beat Loneliness — professionally crafted but spiritually vacant.

Hip-hop and mainstream pop follow the same curve. Eminem’s ferocity on The Marshall Mathers LP has faded into a pale imitation of itself, his once-relentless flow now a labored echo of the danger and precision that made him a force with which to be reckoned. Katy Perry, who rose to pop stardom with songs that once dominated radio, now struggles to crack the charts at all. Robbie Williams, the former swaggering face of pop rebellion, now hovers between self-parody and self-help, the soundtrack of a man navigating his midlife crisis in public. The music industry is ruthless, and it rarely forgives the fade: U2’s last moment of genuine cultural dominance preceded the internet age, and The Rolling Stones have been a touring institution for decades, but their last genuine masterpiece came during the Carter administration.

Age often brings wisdom and skill. But in this particular arena, those virtues rarely translate into work that can compete for space in the collective imagination. The brief, intense window when everything aligns — body, mind, culture, and moment — is when the songs get written that endure for decades. Everything else exists in that alignment’s shadow. There’s no shame in this passing, but the tragedy lies in believing that lightning can be bottled twice.