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

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

A few who I don't believe have been mentioned:

-- Rick Springfield (b. 1949): Maybe the only over 50 artist I can think of who actually seemed to improve in the '00s. Which are to say that Shock/Denial/Anger/Acceptance (2004) and Venus In Overdrive (2008) are the best albums I've ever heard from him. Though, to be fair, I can't claim to have heard all of his previous ones (even from the '80s, when he peaked commercially.)

-- ZZ Top (all 3 b. 1949) Since Afterburner in 1985 they generally, to my ears, retreated to a more stodgy blues-rock purism. But Mescalero from 2003 was a big exception -- the goofiest, weirdest, most fun album they made since Eliminator if not El Loco, and one of the decade's best hard rock albums: Being obsessed with Mexico seems to help.

-- Ted Nugent (b. 1948) Total fascist douchebag, obviously, and not above releasing two (pretty good) live albums in a row, but his last couple of studios have been more consistently entertaining than anybody would have a right to expect -- especially Love Grenade from 2007, and I know other people who swear by 2002's Craveman.

-- Rose Tattoo (old Aussie bar-fight rockers, formed in 1976, so they probably qualify, even if not all of them surived the decade): Blood Brothers was one of my favorite albums of 2008, and I'm also a fan of 2002's Pain and 2000's live 25 To Life.

-- Deep Purple (membership varies, but they're all pretty old I think): One great, highly idiosyncratic, and surprisingly replayable '00s album (Bananas from 2003), one real good one (Rapture Of The Deep from 2005). I also like Ian Gillan's solo One Eye To Morocco from this year and the band's Abandon from 1998, fwiw.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

And actually, come to think of it, I might also put the Kentucky Headhunters in the over-50s-who-actually-got-better-in-the-'00s category along with Springfield, especially if I'm allowed to also include Greg Martin's spinoff bands the Mighty Jeremiahs and Rufus Huff. Not sure off hand how old he (and the rest of the band) are, but he supposedly first formed Itchy Brother (the band that evolved into the Headhunters) with Fred and Richard Young (both still in the band) way back in 1968. And I'd say their cover of "Big Boss Man" definitely qualifies as great music, as well might several of the new tracks on 2003's Soul and 2006's late-career comp Flying Under The Radar.

[koganbot]

Martin is unfailingly interesting as a guitar player, but drawbacks tend to be the vocalists and sometimes the songs. Was listening to Deep Purple's "Highway Star" recently and thought to myself that it simply had a kick of reaching and mattering that I wish Rufus Huff had.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Don't disagree with that appraisal at all (and I actually don't think the Rufus Huff album in itself is all that great -- really tails off after the first couple tracks, and would wind up nowhere near my top 10 anymore if the year ended now), but I honestly don't get the "Highway Star" comparison at all; just seems really random. "Highway Star" probably has more kick than any hip-hip or teen-pop or alt-rock I heard in the '00s, too. That doesn't negate those genres, though. (And just because I prefer X rap or teen-pop song from the '80s to X rap or teen-pop song from the '00s doesn't mean the latter isn't great.)

[koganbot]

Well, that is what I thought when I heard "Highway Star" whereas when I listen to Brenda Lee or Skeeter Davis or the Shirelles or the Shangri-Las I don't go "Oh, they've got something that Taylor needs," even though at their best they've got tracks I like more than anything by Taylor (well, not sure if Lee does, but the other three do). Maybe it's that Taylor has her own strong identity and direction and adventure so I'm not thinking of her needing to live up to anything but her own potential, whereas Rufus Huff don't seem to have a strong identity or direction even if they can do a creditable job drawing from a great well-spring of riffs etc. So hearing stuff from back in the well-spring that does have that reach and direction I'm noticing the difference. (Of course I way undervalued Creem and Purple originally, and maybe at the time I'd have thought how far short they were of Gene Vincent, except I'd never heard of Gene Vincent.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

I guess I see that -- Depends on the vantage point. Like (as you've seen on Jukebox), it's imposible for me to hear the vocodered Zapp/"Planet Rock"/Deele/System synth-funk of the mid '80s and not wonder why, say, T-Pain's or Kanye's AutoTune stuff can't be anywhere near that good. And there probably are '00s hard rock songs (like, the ones that actually get played on hard rock radio, which Rufus Huff doesn't come anywhere near) that I might compare very unfavorably to '70s hard rock classics like "Highway Star" (which, incidentally, was in its decade part of an abundance of hard rock hits just as great as itself, just about any of which would blow away just about any hard rock from this past decade -- mainstream, alt, metal, or otherwise.) And I can see comparing, say, Little Big Town to Fleetwood Mac (though again, it seems kind of pointless, since I'm not sure anybody now is as good as Fleetwood Mac was in the late '70s.) But with Rufus Huff, to me, it might make more sense to compare them to a similarly stodgy smalltime blues-rock bar band from the early '70s, rather than an actual sleek and huge radio hit by a band known all over the world. (As for comparing Taylor to the Shangri-Las, etc, I'd say she comes off really minor in comparison, maybe like White Stripes vs Led Zeppelin. But unlike with the electro-rap guys, I'm sorta with you; I don't automatically think "Taylor" when I hear teen girl classics of past decades. Then again, you like Taylor -- and Kelly and others of that ilk -- more than I do.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Fwiw, nothing on the '00s Deep Purple albums I mentioned is as good as "Highway Star" either. Or even "Space Truckin'". Or probably even "Hush." But it's not like very much other music from the '00s is, either.