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The AARP Is Trolling Musicians Who Turn 50 With Fake “Magazine Covers”

This week, you may have logged into Twitter and seen the above image of a certain lawn show lifer sporting a graying beard and smiling sideways into the camera. You may have noticed the AARP: The Magazine cover and coverline–“Happy 50th Dave Matthews: Ants Marching to 50!”–and thought to yourself, “It’s nice that he’s owning his age, showing fans and fellow musicians that you can still keep your cool at the half-century mark.” Except that Dave Matthews didn’t agree to be featured in AARP. In fact, he was never on the cover at all.

SPIN reached out to the magazine for a PDF copy of the Matthews cover story, because we couldn’t find it online, and wanted to see if there were any newsworthy tidbits inside. An AARP representative politely informed us that the image is only “a celebratory post created for social media, and not an actual AARP The Magazine print cover or article.” In other words, for no particular reason, they just wanted to let their 109,000 Twitter followers know that Dave Matthews is no longer a spring chicken.

Matthews isn’t the first formerly sprightly celebrity to receive a “very special birthday cover.” Fred Armisen, you may recall, is old as well:

And Kiefer Sutherland is no longer the sexy young vampire of Lost Boys:

Adam Sandler: also old.

Old:

Old.

Old!!!!!!!!!

Hootie is old:

Adam Duritz is old:

Téa Leoni is old, too.

Dr. Dre, frankly, is old as shit.

And so on. Again, you’ll find none of the above covers on newsstands. They’re just friendly reminders from the AARP that death, decay, and commercial irrelevance come for us all someday, even TV stars and headphone magnate millionaires. We’d like to join them in wishing Dave Matthews a sincere happy 50th.