If you're hoping to look as good at 50 as you do at 20, there are a lot of (ultimately futile) things you can do. You can eat right. You can exercise. You can try to avoid stress and anything else that's wearing on you, with the help of prayer and meditation.
Most of all, you can make sure not to be a rock star. Our 101-frame Rock Stars: Then and Now slideshow is filled with cautionary tales, but we're not here to say anything more than has already been said about that photo of Axl Rose.
No: We're here to celebrate the rock stars who don't look like they've been drawn onto matryoshka dolls with wax pencil. Here are five rock stars who've aged unnervingly well, in spite of all the roadblocks their particular brand of fame threw in their way.
Aimee Mann
Aimee Mann reached her peak solo fame later in life than the average '80s pop star and continues to look like someone who has no business having been famous in 1985.If her hair were still rendered by the computers that did the "Money for Nothin'" video she could probably still pass.
Morrissey
It's not that Morrissey has aged well so much as it's amazing he's aged at all -- constantly ill, constantly threatening to retire, constantly, somehow, rocking the beginning of a receding hairline, he's gone from a waifish, bitter kid to a weirdly broad-shouldered, bitter adult.
Ice-T
Ice-T already looks like he's 35 in this first photo -- it's the aging-rock-star hair, I think. In his dotage, years of Law and Order under his belt, he's aged past 35, but he's had so many years to do that that it hasn't been an issue.In most recent photos, he's also taking advantage of a classic gracefully-aging-celebrity trick by wearing sunglasses and covering his neck whenever possible. He probably spent 20 minutes arranging that collar.
Ice Cube
Ice Cube doesn't have to rely on those tricks, having transformed in the ensuing 20 years from Ice Cube into a cartoon character who somehow looks exactly like Ice Cube. When he was one of the most vital, controversial artists in hip hop he looked wise beyond his years.When he was the star of Are We There Yet?, one of the most vital, controversial movies in American cinema, he looked so not-wise that he retroactively made it possible to see how young he was when AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted came out.
Courtney Love, Obviously
Courtney Love, though, is proof positive that those of you who've been assiduously watching your diet and exercising and tithing on Sundays are doing the anti-aging thing entirely wrong. No matter how carefully you watch yourself, you're going to have to deal with gradually bulking up and wrinkling and decaying.The key, then, is to start off looking like you're not aging especially well. Courtney Love, through a fortuitous combination of grunge chic and drugs, probably, looked like she was already in the middle of her first or second comeback during her Hole heyday. Now -- with the help, the tabloids tell me, of some plastic surgeons -- she looks like someone who has worked very (maybe even slightly too) hard to make her first comeback.
If she were competing with a more fresh-faced version of her young self, that might be problematic. But in these photos, back in 2010, she basically just looks like Courtney Love.
9 Tips for Using A Fake ID To Get Into A Show Here's How Not to Approach a Journalist on Facebook The 10 Coolest, Scariest, Freakiest Songs About Heroin The 10 Greatest White Rappers
Like Up on the Sun on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for the latest local music news and conversation.
