Mick Jagger Turns 70, Is Now Actual Dinosaur

Mick Jagger is now 70, and after years of jokes about how old the Rolling Stones are, they really aren’t getting any younger, are they?

While many of Mick Jagger’s contemporaries lived fast, died young, and left good looking corpses, the rocker is still rocking as he hits the seven decade mark.

It isn’t just Mick Jagger getting old, and in honor of the septuagenarian’s Friday birthday, the New York Times looked at who survived the 60s and how they’ve fared in recent years as the once young and beautiful rockers of the seminal decade of rock n’ roll hit the Social Security years.

Paul Simon, who is around Jagger’s age, talked to the paper about being old and having mused in music as a young man about golden years.

The paper quotes Simon both in the past, as saying being 70 would be “strange,” and today, after he’d hit the same milestone Mick Jagger reached Friday:

” ‘It is strange,’ said Simon, who is now 71. ‘It’s not terrible, but it is strange.’ The old people he imagined when he was in his 20s — ‘sharing a park bench quietly’ — most definitely did not go on tour. ‘I was thinking of my grandfather. What he was is a lot different from what I am.’ ”

The opinion piece also touches on what seems to be a relatively new idea, that the ages we reach now are somehow “younger” than they once were, or that 40 is the new 30 and 70 is the new 50:

“Of course, in 1965, 70 actually was old, as opposed to now, when it’s the new 50. Or in Jagger’s case, I guess, the recycled 17. ‘I’ll never tour when I’m 50,’ he announced when he was 29 and blissfully unaware that in 2013 he would be celebrating the completion of the Rolling Stones 50th Anniversary Tour.”

The UK’s Guardian Michele Hanson goes one step further, sneering at a youth obsessed culture and adding:

“How sick I am of people who think that the elderly should act with decorum until they fade out and quietly drop dead in their cardigans. I didn’t know there was a cut-off age at which one should stick to shuffling around at a tea dance or give up dancing altogether.”

How do you feel about Mick Jagger turning 70? Does it make you feel old?