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]

Clearly most of my nominations veer toward certain genres (old-school hard rock, country, jazz, weirdo art punk) that seem more accomodating to middle aged people than, say, teen-pop or hip-hop or commercial r&b or extreme metal -- I'd guess African (and regional Mexican?) musics and Southern Soul (and folk?)would meet that criteria as well. Which may just be circular reasoning, come to think of it. So here's a related question: Who was the oldest hip-hip artist to make great music in the '00s? (You can do it with teen-pop, too, but I'm really interested in hip-hop, where artists have never really seemed to age well. Though I bet there are critics out there who would vouch for the current work of, say, Chuck D or maybe KRS-One or Rakim or somebody. All of whom I'm skeptical about, but then again, I was sort of skeptical about all of those guys in the first place, so what do I know?)

[koganbot]

LL has had a couple of very good tracks, the names of which I'm not remembering, and I think they were produced by Timbaland. But LL isn't 50 for another nine years. Also - a feature of my question - I'm not asking for people over 50 who've created great music in the last decade but people over 50 who've sung or rapped on it - of course there can be a correlation. But e.g. Clif Magness has produced stuff that I consider great pop/teenpop such as Kelly Clarkson's "Low" and "Hear Me" and Avril Lavigne's "Unwanted" and "Mobile," was in mid to late 40s when he did them but is over 50 now so he'd count except I'm asking for singers.

So I'm at least somewhat asking about whose voices and mugs are welcome on the best stuff and whose voices and mugs inspire the best stuff, but some of the gatekeepers and some of the inspired may well be over 50 even when the lead singer is a young shoot.

I've had no trouble figuring out what you mean even with the italics screw-ups, but if the screw-ups bother you, you can always check in advance what your post will look like by ticking "Check spelling and preview" before clicking "Post Comment," and then, when it takes you to the spell check, clicking on "Preview." I suspect you won't want to bother.