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]

ALSO PRETTY GOOD, AT VERY LEAST, AND AT LEAST A COUPLE ARE PROBABLY BETTER THAN THAT:

FAUST - C’est Com…Com…Complique (2009 - has a shot at my top ten, believe it or not, just because I play it a lot in the background)
MAC MCANALLY - Down By The River (2009 - b. 1957 -- out next week on Toby Keith's Show Dog label; this could grow on me actually, but I can already tell I like it a lot)
CHEAP TRICK - The Latest (2009)
SAXON - Into The Labyrinth (2009)
GEORGE BRIGMAN - Rags In Skull (2007, b. c. 1956) Baltimore proto-punk crazy; he's got an older album in Stairway if you're curious.
RICHARD THOMPSON - Sweet Warrior (2007, b. 1949) I hadn't liked any albums I heard by him since the early '80s, but I liked this one
RONNIE MILSAP - My Life (2006, b. 1945) -- Album is good; "Something Dry" is great, one of the decade's loveliest country songs
STEVE KUHN -- Promises Kept (2006) and Quiereme Mucho (225) (b. 1938) -- I'm not even going to try to figure out which other jazz guys belong on this list; there are way better people to do that. Probably a lot.
ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO - The Meeting (2003) See, there's another one
THE LIZARDS -- Self-released hard rock/heavy boogie band from NYC; they've put out consistently good albums --sometimes covers, sometimes originals. Not sure of all their ages, but for a while their singer was John Garner from early '70s metal pioneers Sir Lord Baltimore (whose comeback album a couple years ago I also heard good things about but never heard; ditto the Uriah Heep album I didn't hear last year.)
THE BRAIN SURGEONS -- Another self-released NYC old-school hard rock band, weirder and more eccentric and often hilarious, featuring old Blue Oyster Cult drummer Al Bouchard and his wife Deborah Frost of rock criticism fame. Their best '00s album I heard was Beach Party in 2003, but I've liked others by them too.
THE BIZARROS -- Old Cleveland art-punks; Can’t Fight Your Way Up Town From Here (2004) was good.
CHARLIE HADEN - Nocture (2001; b. 1937)
GILBERTO GIL AND MILTON NASCIMENTO - Gil & Milton (2000; both b. 1942)

A FEW GALS (besides Dolly and Loretta, whose albums turned to be not what they at first seemed cracked up to be):

Girlschool (Legacy, 2008)
Labelle (Back To Now, 2008)
Heart (Jupiter's Darling, 2006 -- their best album in decades, and they do have old men not just old women in the band fwiw)

I don't doubt there are others I'm not thinking of right now, who will come to mind soon. One area that might be really worth investigating is Southern Chitlin Circuit Soul (or "Blues," as they still call it in the south), where most of the biggest names have died off, but B-level guys (some of whom may well be over 50 -- Mel Waiters or Bobby Rush or Sir Charles Jones? I dunno) seem to still be doing good work on the circuit. I hear good-to-great songs on the radio down here all the time. But I don't know who sings most of them, and I haven't heard many full albums in the genre -- only compilations.

Also, I haven't had much use for Robert Plant's '00s stuff, but lots of other people clearly did. So maybe there's something there.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Man, I really hate how italics get screwed up for eternity here if you misplace just one bracket or backslash, which I inevitably do, especially when I get long-winded. Oh well.

Anyway, just realized that those jazz records maybe don't have male "singers," since they mostly tend to be instrumental. And I'm not jazz expert anyway. But whatever...

Speaking of which, I also like Bley/Sheppard/Swallow/Billy Drummond's The Lost Chords from 2004. Not going to look up all of their ages, but Carla Bley was born in 1936 and Steve Swallow in 1940.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

...and not only "when I get longwinded," apparently.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Re women of a certain age: Also like 53-year-old Teena Marie's 2009 album Congo Square, though not as much of it as I thought I did when I first heard it (and not nearly as much as her best albums from two decades ago.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Favorite Lizards albums, if anybody cares (which is understandably doubtful, but what the heck): Rule from 2003 (which does feature John Garner howling -- mostly originals, though he also revives his "Kingdom Come" from Sir Lord Baltimore days) and Ar-Che-Ol-O-Gy from 2008 (where the singer is Mike Dimeo, and the material is all covers -- mostly not-so-famous, largely Stairway To Hell-fodderable songs by Free, the Babys, John Lee Hooker, Boomerang, Humble Pie, Stray Dog, Uriah Heep, Detective.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaand....also like George Thorogood's 2006 The Hard Stuff, released when he was 56. His new The Dirty Dozen is stodgier and less amusing or adventurous, though.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Steve Kuhn Trio's Quiereme Mucho actually came out in 2005, btw, not 225 (in which year he would have been only negative 1713 years old, and thus several centuries too young to qualify.)

[(Anonymous)]

There's also Jesus Is Coming by the Bellamy Brothers (born 1946 and 1950), which I thought was one of the best country albums of 2007.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

And oh yeah -- The Boxmasters (fronted by Billy Bob Thornton, born in 1955) have made two good albums (self-titled last year, Modbilly this year) whether Frank likes them or not.

So basically, in general, I guess I'm not really buying the claim that middle-aged men have made significantly less good music than young women this decade. In fact, I'd guess it's about equal. (Of course, as a middle-aged man myself -- not 50 yet, but I will be before 2010 is over -- I'm probably part of the middle-aged male singers' demographic. But it's not like they're all, or even anywhere near the main people, I listen to.)

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

The correct title of the great '00s Milsap song is actually "Somewhere Dry," not "Something Dry" (really like the Moving To The Sunbelt Desert as a metaphor for Giving Up Drinking, too.)

Also, I think of the Brain Surgeons as more woman-fronted than man-fronted, though both Bouchard and Frost (and other members too, I believe) sing.

And I really should have paid more attention to Frank's "It's got to be a singer (not just a producer or instrumentalist or arranger)" requirement before I came up with this list; would have saved myself a lot of trouble, esp. with the jazz guys. But I do think most of the other artists I've mentioned meet that criteria.