Stop telling me I’m too old to listen to young people’s music – I’ll rap along to hip-hop if I want to

From hip-hop to Billy Bragg, you don’t have you don’t have to be of the same generation, class or race as the artist to appreciate great music

It is a well-known fact that with age comes the relief of not giving a damn what other people think about you. Gone are the days of losing sleep over social mishaps – oh the joy.

That said, I allow myself a gentle cringe when I remember bumping into Billy Bragg at Glastonbury. He was chatting with a man called Jerry who had two front teeth missing, but as Billy had been my hero since I was 16, I was too giddy to register anything else about his friend. I thrust my camera into Jerry’s hand and said: “Can you take a photo of me and Billy please?” To which my then-boyfriend suddenly piped up: “Shap, let me have the camera and I’ll take a photo of all three of you”. I glared at him and refused. “I just want me and Billy,” I said. So now I have a photograph of me beaming next to a distracted-looking Billy Bragg, taken by Jerry Dammers of The Specials.

I keep it in a box in the back of a cupboard, because although I don’t want to throw it away, I don’t want to be constantly reminded of what a wazzock I was in my twenties. Generally, though, a sense of self-acceptance has been growing within me since somewhere around my 35th birthday. After all, nothing brings acceptance of exactly who you are and what you look like more than hurtling at breakneck speed towards death, and life comes at you fast as you get older – believe me. You’ve barely taken down the last bit of tinsel before you have to start digging out scraps of wrapping paper again.

On the whole, getting older is good. It’s certainly better than the alternative. What you don’t really appreciate until it happens to you, though, is that underneath all of the experience that you amass, you remain essentially the same person that you were when you were 20. You’re just that much more conspicuous in nightclubs full of other 20-year-olds, or when you admit that you like the same music as them.

It’s a shame if you ask me, because so many of the very best and most beautiful lyrics – the ones that form the soundtrack to your life – were written by very young people. Billy Bragg might have been more like 24 years when he wrote that song, but his own hero Paul Simon (who he borrowed the lyric from) was genuinely 21 when he set timeless songs like “The Sound of Silence” loose on the world. Perhaps he had to be?

In the maddeningly raw years of your teens and early twenties, every feeling that you have spills out at the seams, and when that unwieldy swell of excitement and emotion falls under the hand of an artist – it’s a perfect storm. What tumbles out can sometimes come as close as we ever get to verbalising the agony and ecstasy of human experience: the young show us what it is to be so alive and remind us all that we are.

As far as I’m concerned, there should never be a cut-off point for enjoying new music and new artists. I’ve always loved rap and hip-hop, and I still do. As a teen, I listened to Public Enemy, Ice-T, and whatever else I could get my skint hands on. Later, I fell in love with Eminem and now I find Stormzy compulsive in much the same way. Like all of those artists, he comes from a wildly different world to me, but writes with a boundless wit and invention that makes me want to hear everything he has to say. And how can you not adore a south London man who’s self-possessed enough to rhyme “lapel” with “your girl”?

Of course, grime came about long after the days had ended when I had acres of time just to sit in a room and obsess over every detail. If I’d been a teen today, perhaps it would have been me at Glastonbury being pulled up by the brilliant 21 year-old rap artist Dave and going toe-to-toe with him, just as 15-year-old Alex did, creating one of the most gloriously memorable moments in the festival’s long history.

But this is the thing about music: you don’t have to be of the same generation, class or race as the artist to get it and appreciate it. It works our emotions on such a fundamental level that it can cross any boundary without even trying. And so, just as there will no doubt be an 18 year-old working-class kid in Norbury right now who’s mad into Wagner, there is also a middle-aged comedian in Ealing who can’t get enough of Dave.