Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

When elders colonize the rebellion

Every movement that starts with rebellion and energy eventually gets absorbed by the people it originally pushed against. The Jazz Age wasn't really about the music—it was about youth refusing the rules their parents lived by. But here's what's oddly predictable: once something becomes valuable, powerful people move in. By the late 1920s, the very establishment figures who'd dismissed jazz as vulgar were suddenly hosting lavish parties where it played in the background. The authentic edge got smoothed into status.

This happens to almost every cultural moment we think of as revolutionary. What starts grassroots gets gentrified. The elders don't just tolerate the new thing—they colonize it, drain it of its original defiance, and turn it into decor. TikTok trends, streetwear, slang—they all follow this same arc. The really frustrating part? The young people who built the thing feel it dying even as it becomes mainstream. Success and compromise arrive on the same day.

What Fitzgerald is pointing out is that nothing stays young. There's something almost tragic about watching the very qualities that made something vital get flattened by legitimacy. The party doesn't get better when the adults finally show up. It just becomes something else entirely.