Great music in the last decade with male lead singers that are over fifty years old

[koganbot]

Tom creates a graph that shows a long-term trend upward in the percentage of UK singles with a female lead. This is a crude measure (number ones aren't necessarily representative of what's on singles as a whole, and singles aren't necessarily representative of what's popular among music consumers, etc.) and Tom makes no great claims for the chart. But the trend is striking.

Interesting parallel here, though, is that this graph comes close to matching the trends in my taste for contemporary music, with my late '80s veering wildly towards the women (thanks to postdisco and freestyle, and the decline in the quality of postpunk) and the mid to late '00s going even more wildly female (thanks to r&b and teenpop stealing my heart from hip-hop) - but my number is way higher than 50%. Not that during the decades of this graph I was even hearing much of what was #1 in the UK or having exposure to all the main popular styles there. And it isn't as if stuff that was pushing my listening - e.g., freestyle - was pushing British listening. Just that my trend seemed to be happening at the same time as the British chart trend, which is towards music fronted by women and girls.

Tom didn't graph by age, but I suspect that most of the women are young women, though I wouldn't have any idea if the average age would have changed much over the decades. (I'd guess that there are fewer older women, bringing the average age down, but that's a wild guess, my hardly knowing the performers much less the data.)

But anyway, it's disturbing to me how few good songs now are fronted by males (obviously that's comparative, since e.g. The-Dream will likely make my album's list this year)(but I'm not even sure how good a front man he is, just a maker of good music). Just as disturbing is the lack of great music that's fronted by people of any sex over forty. I hope that's not true in the cultures and genres I don't know much about.

So here's a question for you. What male singers over the age of fifty or acts fronted by a male singer over the age of fifty have made great popular music in the last decade? It's got to be a singer (not just a producer or instrumentalist or arranger) and the greatness has to be in the last decade (so not someone formerly great who's carrying on OK). I say "popular music" real loosely, and actually you can list any man whether his music is popular or not. I'll put my own answer in the comments.

Also am curious about your trends, and your speculations as to the reasons behind them.

Comments

[koganbot]

xpost (and I thank you for your posts)

First in my mind is Willie Nelson, 'cause I love whole hunks of Moment Of Forever from last year, though there's blah on it, too. I'd say most of what I've heard of his this decade has barely gotten beyond so-what, with bits of greatness and then on this album more than just bits, and I'm not at all complete in my listening to Willie, either old or new. Actually, until recently I thought he was an overrated bore; obviously I was wrong. Subject for further research.

Merle Haggard "Wishing All These Old Things Were New." Haven't heard the album it was from, though many say it's great and a few retort that it's overrated. This song is sure great, older and slower than "Mama Tried" and "Sing Me Back Home" etc., but in their league. Other stuff I heard on a later LP was thoughtful and I respected it; subject for further research.

Bob Dylan Love And Theft. Damned if I know what I think of this, still. Most of the songs have a slow haze that I find discomfitting, as if sentiment were out baking in the dirt along with his gobbled croak of an old voice. But it's a potent... something. Honestly, I have yet to sit down and try to make something of the lyrics. A couple of rockers knock down the walls. Also love one of the muddy blues on Modern Times. Subject for further research.

The Rolling Stones "It Won't Take Long." An utter grinding motherfucker of a song, with shifting restless lyrics that are as unsettled as the lyrics on "Heart Of Stone." Jagger's voice lacks the old potency 'cause he turned off his killer instinct back around 1972, so it doesn't grab me by the throat, but as a dark little groove it could stand with 'most anything on Exile. About half of what's left on A Bigger Bang is pretty good too.

Bobby Bare "Are You Sincere?" Voice cracked, arrangements overblown, audacious, he pulls off maybe two-thirds of this absurd album (The Moon Was Blue), don't know if I want to hear another like it, but it reached me far more than the better known comebacks by Dolly and Loretta.

Gene Watson ...Sings: Straight ahead bread-and-butter country just as it might have sounded twenty years ago, seems comfortable in its place (though being country it's never altogether comfortable), nothing jumping out to say "extroardinary" but I love listening. Barely know a thing about this guy, my knowledge of any country that's not recent being rather meager.

Wouldn't call it great, but I liked a T. Graham Brown LP I heard from a few years back. And that's all I can think of. I hope a bunch spring to my mind that are currently not in it. I've not heard any of this decade's David Thomas/Pere Ubu/Rocket From The Tombs; there's a Leonard Cohen album that went in one ear and out the other that garnered great praise and that I ought to try again. I never did like Nick Cave and Tom Waits all that much, so if they're doing great stuff I didn't listen (actually a friend played me a couple of recent Nick Cave tracks that I thought were OK).

The market's not supporting older performers, so plenty could be great that are not making it to record, and my ears have gone along with the market by not really searching what has made it to record but not into the top 40 or the r&b and hip-hop grapevine, so my ignorance is self-perpetuating. But I really get the sense that the music vocabulary may not be working for people my age and older (I'm 55), that it gets us through but it's not a living thing, though I sure hope that that's not true of my written vocabulary.

[koganbot]

I wouldn't ever have called John Waite great, but haven't heard much of his output so maybe I'm wrong, and his album from a couple of years ago on Rounder had some strong moments, includes a rousing version of "Highway 61 Revisited," gut-blues instrumentation and his high pop-rock voice feeling far from dated. (Not that "dated" is necessarily bad, mind you.)

[koganbot]

Don't think anything on last year's John Anderson album quite makes it to "great," but I don't see any reason why he couldn't do something great soon. Alan Jackson did a beautiful album a couple of years ago, before he hit 50, but he's over 50 now.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I like that John Waite album, too. But he did better stuff (with more cultural reach, obviously) solo in the '80s ("Missing You" and "Change") and with the Babys before that (almost every track on their best-of LP). But again (see "Highway Star" comments below), that doesn't mean the three or four great tracks on Downtown--Journey Of A Heart aren't great, too. (I.e.: Not all greatness is created equal.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

George Smith, on the Rolling Hard Rock thread on ILM, also mentions Waite's The Hard Way from 2004, which I never heard (though some songs from it did show up again on that Rounder album.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I would rep for the Leonard Cohen album in question, which I think is top three for his career.

With skyecaptain in that African pop guys seem to continue consistent (Youssou N'Dour is 50 this year). But then I suspect I'm not the best person for this question because I usually don't agree that artists do less interesting work as they get older. So maybe devoted Afropop fans think N'Dour or Khaled or Baaba Maal have utterly gone to seed, I wouldn't know. XD;

One for the over-50s ladies who are as good as they were: Linda Thompson. (I can probably think of more folk artists if I tried.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Another thought: Candi Staton (1943) - according to Wikipedia, "You've Got The Love" was UK top 10 at three separate times through the 90s and 00s, in different remixed forms. And what I've heard of her comeback album was excellent, one of those things I keep meaning to pick up.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

And - one change here might be that I don't know anyone my age or younger who is against listening to music (past or now) made by people currently in their 50s on principle, even if actual proportion of listening habits may vary. (I thought about this because my instinct was to turn this question over to the non-Poptimist music fans on my flist, as a discussion they would actually be interested in. XD)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I did a study on european teenagers last year and a result that I found really interesting (tho my editors didnt ;)) - there's big variance by age in who teens from which country pick as favourite pop stars - in the UK it skews very much to youth but in Italy none of the top 5 were under 40 (IIRC).

[koganbot]

In general, I wouldn't expect, e.g., actors, painters, novelists, rock critics, chefs, etc. to all go into decline after 50, and I speculate that the factors that make the old guys my ears run into not that good are (1) my heart is still with rock, hip-hop, and dance, and the first two haven't figured out a way to a nonboring adulthood, and the last will prefer female voices to male anyway, and (2) maybe masculinity doesn't make all that much sense anymore, either, at least not for men, so it's women who now make more convincing rock than men do (though don't know how many pop or rock women are allowed to keep going after age forty).

I'd sure hope that there are genres around the world where old guys do well.

[koganbot]

But in any event, right now someone like me could not be the voice or the face for the music that's most alive and matters most to me - we wouldn't be permitted. And quite possibly someone like me would not do a good job as the voice and the face.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

"The market's not supporting older performers"

- I don't know. Maybe the market isn't, but the media is: there's a bunch of Old White Guys for whom fawning coverage every time they make a new album is a given. Neil Young, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Tom Waits...all the ::CANON:: dudes, basically. At least in terms of media presence, they're going as strong as ever.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Actually, given that "the market" these days means the concert industry at least as much as the recording industry, the market absolutely definitely is supporting old performers -- sometimes way better than young performers. There was a pretty funny Doonsebury (I think it was) in the paper a few weeks ago where these scraggly guys were starting a rock band, and couldn't wait until they could be has-beens like Van Halen or the Eagles (or whoever) so they could make real money in the business. Which is to say, lots of older rock bands whose new music doesn't dominate radio anymore are still making a killing live.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

My favorite '00s Haggard album, by far, was actually his poorly distributed, small-label Like Never Before from 2003. Though I wouldn't swear that I like any individual track on it more than "Wishing All These Old Things Were New"; the album that song was on got way more press (and placed in Pazz & Jop), which had as much to do with it coming out on the highly visible adult alternative label Anti- as anything else. Beyond the single, it wasn't that great.

Definitely second the Stones, Gene Watson, and T. Graham Brown nominations above, too.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

And my favorite late-period Willie Nelson album, bizarrely, is Night And Day, an instrumental country jazz album from 1999, which discounts it here for two different reasons.