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]

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.