Where has my love for singer-songwriters gone? (long time passing)

My only mp3 player these days is my phone, which it doesn't have that much room for music on it, so what gets put on there is a pretty good snapshot what's in heavy rotation for me at the moment. I was at the gym today with all the songs on shuffle and realised that, of the 21 albums on my phone, not a single one of them belongs the category that once defined my music taste: guitar-centric folk/rock with a heavy emphasis on the lyrical articulation of complex emotions. I tend to think of this as singer-songwriter music even when it includes bands like Mumford and Sons.

Not only do I no longer keep up with this music, I actually seem to have developed something verging on an antipathy to it. I have scoffed my way through various people's attempts to get me to the appreciate the likes of Iron and Wine, that other one I confuse with Iron and Wine (maybe it's the one you went to see that had suddenly included a horn section? or was that actually Iron and Wine), the National, Kurt Vile, you name it. I swear I look at the beard-y faces of these guys and I just...can't. Even when I can't see their faces--even if they don't have facial hair!--I feel like I can hear the beards.

Probably my problem has something to do with the earnestness, the sincere-but-ironic-but-sincere thing that Gen Y has made its signature, but honestly with the exception of the ever-brilliant James McMurtry I can't really stand much of this sort of thing from people Gen X or older either. I would crawl through glass (ok, just figuratively) if someone told me that on the other side was the music of a woman as brilliant and edgy and musically inventive as PJ Harvey or Liz Phair in their prime, but no one like that has come down the pike in quite some time. (Laura Marling and Martha Wainwright are probably the closest in recent years, but neither has quite the teeth of PJ or Liz for me.)

So yeah, it's kind of a gender problem. But it's a gender problem because it's an identification problem. I don't feel engaged by the feelings being conveyed, and to me that's what singer-songwriter music is all about. I can't find the women who would speak to me, and these days the men really don't. (I have no such problem with Elliott Smith, who I love unequivocally; I still haven't quite worked that one out.)

As this state of affairs has gone on longer and longer, I've grown to dislike even the signature sound of singer-songwriter-y music: the unprocessed voice, the bright, right-in-your-ear guitar strumming, the unmistakeable sound of yearning. Give me something so glossy that discerning sincerity in it is actually work (the Beyonce tracks I linked to before).

Or something harsh and performative and slick:

or humming with affects that are compelling because they are not identifiable:

or with its emotion couched in music so dark that its delivers its feelings with a be-careful-what-you-wish-for smirk:

or that's an express refusal of all emotion:

All these songs are, not incidentally, from albums that would easily make my top ten or 20 of 2013. Their gender politics are no better--and in some cases they are much, much worse--than the Iron and Wines of this world, but I guess the difference is that I'm not expecting to identify. I don't feel as if the point of the music is to present me with a set of feelings that I can recognise as sincere and embrace accordingly. At this point in my life, I can deal with Kanye's straight-up misogyny better than I can the introspective musings of a sincere guy I'm supposed to like but can't.

My embrace of emotional distance in music probably explains why the first-person songwriting I've enjoyed the most in the last five or so years has come more out of hiphop than folk traditions. It has as much of an individual perspective and distinctive musical signature as what would usually be classed as singer-songwriter stuff: the feeling of another person there, thinking aloud, in a personal musical style. But the generic difference makes a difference. I think it's because the conventions of hiphop are all about how specific and in some way unknowable the life being described is. This track by Skinnyman is so brilliant because he tells us all the reasons why it's so hard to understand his world, but then manages to deliver a slice of it anyway.