Thank you Jamiroquai for getting old

Good morning and welcome back to Creative Parenting Club.

This week on CPC, Diego takes us to a Jamiroquai concert that quickly takes an unexpected turn.

Watching a longtime music hero live on stage, he’s surprised. He laughs. He even feels a brief moment of pity. But little by little, something shifts, because what he’s really witnessing isn’t just a performance. It’s what it looks like to get older and still show up with presence, humor, and real craft.

Seeing Jamiroquai in 2026 brings up bigger questions: why society ties “cool” so tightly to youth, what parenthood quietly changes about identity and self-image, and how expectations can block the joy of the moment.

It’s an essay about growing up without growing boring, and about realizing that getting old might actually be the coolest thing a person can do.

With that in mind, here is this week’s essay.

How watching Jamiroquai moving orthopedically on stage made me be thankful for getting old.

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By Diego Ain

My pre-adolescence took place in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Along with that period came the beginning of my music career: playing percussion and discovering bands that would shape my musical world for life.

One of them was Jamiroquai, at the time, one of the revelations and spearheads of a new movement called acid jazz.

A new kind of music that mixed the best elements from different genres:

Chord progressions and melodies from jazz and soul, grooves from funk, and sounds and textures from the psychedelic and disco era.

An explosive mix of tasteful, danceable, signature sounds that blew the minds of kids like me, interested in more complex music than what mainstream radio offered, without losing youth’s freshness and energy. It felt like the doors to a vintage world had been opened for us by people who had been eating that food daily, and now they were sharing what they had digested from it.

And Jamiroquai, in my opinion, offered the most out of that concept, pushing aesthetic boundaries not only sonically, but visually too.

He looked amazing with those crazy, unique hats and, even more importantly:

He moved and danced like no one else.

Oh man. I still remember the feeling of seeing him for the first time in the Space Cowboy video, the single from their second album The Return of the Space Cowboy.

His syncopated, totally unexpected body moves opened the door to a completely new world of artistic and human expression!

He moved so freely, and at the same time so in sync with the music. It was incredible to see how he jammed with his body the way a jazz musician improvises a solo: no preparation, just a lot of knowledge applied without second thoughts. You could feel he didn’t rehearse those moves, he just felt it, and had probably been doing it for so long that it became a mature language of its own.

The opposite kind of maturity from Michael Jackson’s moves, for example, where you can clearly sense the thought and practice behind every detail. Jamiroquai, on the other hand, was like a force of nature, letting the music take over his body, like a spirit using a medium in a séance.

Those images have been ingrained in my memory ever since.

Even though I’ve always been a big fan of the music and his aesthetics, I had never been to a show.

Time passed. He had a hiatus. I grew up and, among many adventures, started a family, one of those processes that makes you question your own coolness.

I used to roam freely: not planning vacations, just jumping on airplanes last minute, touring around the globe, and living the “high times”, as Jamiroquai would say. After you have a kid, you don’t fully own your life anymore, you barely own your daily schedule. And with routine comes (or should I say, goes) self-care, including that extra time you used to invest in picking your clothes, giving yourself that edge… cool.

As my kids got older, I recovered that edge. I started paying attention again, not only to myself, but also to my image and that sense of edginess/coolness.

Now I feel I’m back in my groove, and Jamiroquai is coming to town.

It’s time to meet my youth dance hero.

I knew I was coming to see an older Jay Kay, but I didn’t know what his dancing status would be. Deep down, I knew he wouldn’t be moving like before, but I still had this delusional hope of seeing the squirrely frontman of the mighty Jamiroquai.

The show starts. He comes out dressed like he had a formal appointment, but only committed to the jacket. The rest was jeans and a random polo shirt.

That was already a big surprise, and a bit of a red flag. In the past, he would be dressed in a slick, authentic way. For the second song, he changed and came out in his signature Adidas setup.

If you know him, you might have this image in mind:

But what showed up was this:

My partner and I were laughing, partly because it looked funny, partly because he was trying to dance but couldn’t. He would try to do the old moves but couldn’t. Strangely enough, he hadn’t found a new Jamiroquai, kind of “this is how I dance now that I’m old”. It was super strange to see how he looks. As if he never danced in his life. I was shocked and very sad. Kind of feeling pity for him.

At the end of that track he changed to a clothing he felt more comfortable in and said on the mic something like:

“I’m glad I’m not in that hot bag anymore”.

And that’s when things started to change for me. I could see he was doing it for us. Someone on his team probably told him it would be a good idea to dress like the old times, a revival moment for the fans. And that changes everything, because now, instead of perceiving him as someone trying to cling to old glory days, you could see he was there to entertain us and give us the best experience possible, even if it put him in an uncomfortable situation.

The show keeps going. He’s singing like never before. The band is kicking ass. The music is just amazing, as it has always been.

Throughout the show, he keeps trying to dance. The audience goes crazy every time he attempts an old move. He even lands a couple of them. And then again he comes to the mic, acknowledges his situation, and says:

“My brain is sending checks but my legs are not cashing out!”

We all laughed, him included. And from that moment on, for me, the whole show and his presence changed drastically.

Now I could not only understand what was happening, but most importantly, empathize with him.

He was older. He wasn’t the young, crazy-moving Jay Kay anymore. Now he was this guy in his late fifties who had lived an intense life, so intense he was paying the price on stage. But still, he was there to delight us with his presence, humor, and incredible musical talent. And that was more than enough.

My empathy toward him, and actually toward all of us who have kids and somehow lose our coolness along the way, only grew, to the point that I got emotional and kind of cried from happiness during the show.

I felt so happy and privileged to be there with the love of my life, dancing and singing to some of the best songs in my life’s repertoire, with one of my youth heroes giving it all for us, that I ended up having this vision:

Thank you, Jamiroquai, for getting old! It’s so cool that you’re still alive and getting up on stage to share your talent with us.

Which made me wonder: why is the image of “cool” and “edgy” so deeply tied to being young? Why can’t mature people be cool and have an edge? Why are we, as a society, so obsessed with staying young, especially physically?

Why aren’t we embracing the process of getting old with more acceptance, and I’d even risk saying, more admiration and respect?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s all connected to the Virtual Reality we’re living in.

Cheers to the people who are getting old - or should we say, maturing - with grace, consciously, and with presence. Because getting old might actually be the coolest thing a person can do.

How do see yourself growing older?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you back here soon.