Aging & Wisdom Quote by Bill Wyman

Wyman’s question lands like a politely sharpened knife: he’s not nostalgically begging for oldies, he’s calling out an industry that treats time like spoilage. “To the young public” is the giveaway. He’s pointing at a gatekeeping system that doesn’t merely reflect youth tastes, but manufactures them by rationing what counts as “current.” Radio (and now streaming’s playlist economy) isn’t a neutral jukebox; it’s a pipeline where novelty is branded as virtue and back-catalog is framed as irrelevant homework.

The “apart from a few hits” aside does double work. It admits the obvious exceptions while exposing how narrow the exception list is: a tiny museum of “classics” permitted to circulate, often as punchlines, karaoke staples, or commercials. Everything else - deep cuts, entire eras, the messy middle where scenes form and artists evolve - gets erased. That erasure isn’t accidental. Old music competes too well: it’s already paid for culturally, often sonically distinctive, and doesn’t need marketing oxygen. Keeping it off youth-facing radio protects the business model of constant release cycles, chart churn, and the illusion that the present is always more urgent than the past.

Coming from Wyman, a Rolling Stones veteran who watched rock become canon and then become “legacy,” the line also carries a quiet warning. If music history is only allowed to survive as a handful of hits, young listeners aren’t being introduced to a tradition; they’re being trained to consume a feed.