Dear Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Adapt or Die —
Love, A Millennial
Why I still care about those luddites at the Rock Hall, and how they must evolve
As a place of worship, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is easy to ignore, particularly if you’ve never been there. Its tucked-away location in Cleveland requires, for most, a pilgrimage. Unless you’re from Ohio or its surrounding states, few end up traveling to Cleveland on weekend trips, family vacations, or even business trips. I say this as a proud native of Northeast Ohio: Why would you? Even LeBron left us for a spell, returning this season precisely because he’s a local.
Standing tall like the Louvre of Lake Erie, the museum’s glass-paneled pyramid lobby was one I walked through a number of times throughout my impressionable adolescence. Interacting with the physical embodiment of an institutional concept—and not in some afterthought way like the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles—makes it easier to wrap your head around. By the time I left Northeast Ohio at 17, I felt as though I had a firm grasp on what this whole Rock Hall thing was about. I thought I understood why The Ronettes and Madonna were in, but Whitney Houston was not. Why the members of The Beatles and The Yardbirds were inducted multiple times (thrice for Clapton), but my childhood favorites Electric Light Orchestra and The Cars were not. Why the Hall supposedly had it out for KISS and Rush—well, until these last two years.
Why do some musicians deserve the hero treatment, and others do not?
I had believed there were rules and boundaries within pop music that differentiated “important” art from frivolously enjoyable tunes, and the Rock Hall was at the center of that, to me, when I was a kid, much as something like Pitchfork is for young music fans today.
The truth is, the Rock Hall doesn’t make much sense—but they’re trying. Not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to. They’re fighting a race against rock and roll’s blurred-line progression, as far as their induction classes go. An artist’s first album or single must have been released 25 years before they can be nominated for the following year’s class. From Link Wray to T. Rex to Afrika Bambaataa to Sonic Youth to Gram Parsons to Sade, there are a number of acts so fundamentally influential, one would expect them to have been inducted years ago. And each fall, most of these acts are passed over in favor of the rookies—your Nirvanas, your R.E.M.s, your Green Days, your Nine Inch Nails. As the nomination minimums careen towards the decade alternative went mainstream (i.e. the 1990s), the acts who managed to influence the right kind of people while still winning over the masses will continue their hot streak. And as much as I don’t totally understand why the nominating committee doesn’t say, “Hey Cheap Trick, it’s about time,” I recognize that fighting this impulse is a positive step. The hesitation to induct every single respectable rock act communicates to the world, “The long history of white dudes who ripped off the blues aren’t the only significant players in the evolution of modern music.” Well, the gesture says this as much as popular American music over the last 60 years says this. Which is to say, we could do better.
Rock and Roll Tradition, for Better or Worse
As much as rock and roll can unite strangers, the artform can also exclude in a fierce, palpable way. You’ll find testimonies of this in interviews with the women who defied the odds—the Wilson sisters, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, Courtney Love, Kathleen Hanna. Even as a preteen in the era of Y2K, I was made to feel like I did not belong in my small town’s music store, where I took electric guitar lessons. Rock and roll was just another male-dominated sport, despite its near ubiquity and almost hometown pride throughout Northeast Ohio, the so-called birthplace of the genre. (In all actuality, Cleveland is merely responsible for the popularization of the term rock ‘n’ roll, via WJW DJ Alan Freed.) This is a geographical locale rife with classic rock radio stations — I remember three great ones from my father’s radio dial.
Basically, Northeast Ohio is permanently stuck in 1978. Only a certain amount of weird is tolerated by the dominant culture there. This is the land of Devo, Chrissie Hynde, and The Black Keys — the sort of bands who started off square-pegged thanks in part to the Midwest’s intense othering. It’s the kind of place where the oppression of rock and roll — specifically who should play it — is still felt in its own quiet way, or at least it was a decade ago when I drove around town hearing the same three Who songs on the radio, like some kind of indoctrination for rock’s highlight reel. Still, in this suburban wasteland where high school football reigns and prom kings are gods, good old-fashioned rock and roll remained some kind of savior for the losers. And I was one of them.
All this is to say, I still care about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Founded in 1983 by Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun (who subsequently assembled a team including Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Sire Records mastermind Seymour Stein, and Springsteen manager Jon Landau, who now chairs the nomination committee), the organization is a major force in educating the wider listening public about rock and roll’s early unsung heroes, particularly black blues influences. The myth of Robert Johnson and the deal he made with the devil at the Crossroads might have been lost on later generations had institutions like the Rock Hall and Rolling Stone not existed (not to mention Clapton). Starting in 1986, the Hall’s earliest inductions were rife with blues pioneers like Lead Belly and Muddy Waters. As the years have passed and pickings have grown slimmer, blues guitarists with less visible brands — like Albert King in 2013 — have made their way into the Hall, and not necessarily relegated to the “Early Influencer” induction category. The dedication is impressive, even if it puts a premium on old music instead of new-school innovators in hip-hop, pop, and hard-to-parse mixes of genres (i.e. where music is heading).
The Millennial Dilemma
Caring about the Rock Hall’s choices feels a little unnatural to millennials. Up until this point, the music made for our generation has not been highlighted by the Hall, due to the 25-year nomination requirement. Baby-boomer favorites historically have gotten the rock and roll glory, and young music lovers were left to feel like all the great, big changes in rock and roll had come and gone by the time they showed up. Over the last few years, as Gen X’s alternative music icons have started being inducted, I’ve seen more and more friends of that generation care about the Rock Hall. I remember one such colleague offhandedly commenting upon the announcement of Nirvana’s induction, “Oh, I guess I have to care now.”
I think millennial music fans will reach this conclusion in a decade or so, but it requires the Rock Hall’s recognition of the divergent path taken by popular music in response to the rise of Internet culture. The nomination committee needs to accept two things throughout next two decades: genre terms ain’t nothing but marketing tools, and that influential-but-not-popular bands did—and will continue to—change popular music.
This last point will ring particularly true in about a decade as the eligibility years creep towards the new millennium, a time when rallying niche fandoms was made easier than ever via online tools. I don’t expect the nominating committee will go full-on Pitchfork and induct Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James (eligible for Class of 2017) or even Arthur Russell (first eligible for Class of 2004) anytime soon. But embracing outsider culture’s most mainstream beacons of darkness—like Brian Eno, the Pixies, The Smiths (nominated this year), The Replacements (nominated last year), The Cure, Nick Cave, and in years to come, Radiohead, Elliott Smith, Hole, and Beck—would be a good place to start in terms of deprioritizing mainstream hit appeal as a qualification. The “weirdest,” and one of the least hit-driven, Rock Hall inductee has got to be Tom Waits, Class of 2011. Usually the nomination committee’s experimental-meets-commercial sweetspot centers around CBGB punks like The Ramones and The Talking Heads (both Class of 2002), plus those who originated the oxymoronical concept of an alternative icon existing in the mainstream, such as The Velvet Underground and David Bowie (both Class of 1996). Which brings me to this year’s nomination class.
This Year’s Nominees
Earlier this month, 15 acts were named as the 2015 nominees: Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, N.W.A, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Lou Reed, The Smiths, The Spinners, Sting, Chic, Kraftwerk, The Marvelettes, Bill Withers, War, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Most likely five or six of these acts will be announced as next April’s inductees (there’s no set number) just before 2014 comes to a close.
Lou Reed, The Smiths: Mass-Consumed Alt Icons
Lou Reed and The Smiths fall within the “alternative icon existing within mass culture” category — one that exists so reliably in the Rock Hall because these sorts of figureheads have at least a few commercial hits. Despite being eligible since Class of 1998, Reed will make it in now. Akin to Donna Summer’s 2013 induction, Reed’s passing has brought him to mind again among voters.
The Smiths, on the other hand, will more than likely not make the cut, despite their immense influence on the dramatic lyricists and post-punk guitarists who would fancy themselves either Morrissey or Marr in the decades to come. They are, for one, a little too associated with the mid-eighties boom of England’s influential Rough Trade label. Their Seymour Stein connection isn’t enough for the Rock Hall to recognize them as American (or rather, part of American mainstream culture) in a distinct way, despite the fact that The Smiths remain shorthand for “I was a teenage outcast”—a tenet of rock and roll if there ever was one. The Beatles, The Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, The Who—those are British bands so massive, America couldn’t ignore them, so we made them our own. It’s a real shame The Replacements did not, as expected, make the cut last year when they were nominated for the first time. They may be the most distinctly Midwestern blue-collar equivalent of The Smiths we have.
NIN, Green Day, Kraftwerk: Cred vs. Commerce
In recent years, the Rock Hall has liked to show off its contemporization efforts by inducting one, maybe two, newly eligible acts per class. Nine Inch Nails and Green Day hold down the rookie fort in their first year of eligibility, but they—along with German Krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk—also represent outsider culture successfully infiltrating the mainstream, either as an influential left-turn towards electronic experimentation (Kraftwerk, NIN) or as a breakthrough phenom (also NIN, GD). Oscar winner and Beats By Dre Chief Creative Officer Trent Reznor should slide into the Class of 2015 with relative ease, and I don’t mean to say that his industry connections are a bad thing. It’s just the sort of mainstream credibility that goes hand in hand with a Rock Hall induction.
At this point, Green Day is a mainstream legacy act, revered as much for the youthful nostalgia that surrounds 1994’s Dookie as their late-2000s radio hits. This commercial upswing probably made them more appealing to Rock Hall’s nomination committee, which it’s necessary to understand is a more focused group of prominent individuals in the music industry than the general voting body. In addition to industry folks, music historians, and critics, the voting body consists of all Rock Hall inductees. This explains some of why long-eligible acts keep getting inducted, rather than all freshly eligible acts: inductees would rather see themselves surrounded by their own influences, rather than those they influenced. The whole Groucho Marx “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” philosophy comes into play, just a little.
This mentality could help Kraftwerk eventually make it into the Hall, specifically via the votes of left-field (yet commercially viable) musicians who came after them but were inducted before them (someone like Reznor would vote for them). But this year is not the year, despite the band’s recent sold-out tours of modern art museums around the world; if anything, that makes them look more avant garde, which is a category strategically dabbled in by the Hall.
On the other hand, a marquee appeal only goes so far among the inductee portion of the voting body. When someone has sacrificed artistic credibility for the sake of commercial appeal in a thirsty way—take perennial Grammy host and TV staple LL Cool J, for example—I think there is a skepticism to let them into the Rock Hall, despite artistic feats they may have achieved early on in their careers. The nomination committee and the voting body can, and do, disagree. Someone like LL is a perfect example of the voting body seeing the importance of an artist, but needing to beat the voters over the head with the concept. He was nominated in his first year of eligibility (Class of 2010), the following year, and again three years later. It seems as though the nomination committee has since moved on to other hip-hop acts in an effort to continue their diversification efforts of the Hall. KISS is an interesting example of the opposite problem: the nomination committee did not put hard rock’s most business-savvy band on the ballot until a decade after eligibility (2010), despite near-constant whining from frontman Gene Simmons. And it only took two nominations to get them into the Hall in 2014.
N.W.A: the Hip-Hop as ‘Rock’ Debate
As for this year’s diversification efforts, politically-charged rap’s hot streak will likely continue with N.W.A, a group that would introduce West Coast hip-hop into the Hall while simultaneously inducting industry behemoth Dr. Dre. It wasn’t too long ago that hip-hop finally made its way into the Rock Hall, starting with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 2007. Since then, three hip-hop groups—Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, and Public Enemy—have made their way into the Hall.
Every year, the debate over whether hip-hop even belongs in the Rock Hall flairs up among purists, whose narrow perceptions of rock are precisely the definition of rockism. I understand, and I suspect the Rock Hall itself does too, that rock and roll as a genre term was once the catch-all for popular (i.e. non-classical) music. When music culture started expanding rapidly and splitting off into genre-based subcultures, there was a siloing effect in the eyes of those who wanted to separate from what they perceived to be the mainstream, major-label machine. In just the last half decade or so, as advances in digital music have facilitated genre agnosticism and poptimism, this siloing has slowly started to undo itself. But the damage has already been done in terms of the Rock Hall’s branding: bystanders know it best as a beacon of excellence in guitar music. Hell, even Gene Simmons thinks that.
Shortly before his own induction earlier this year, Simmons displayed his bass-ackwards take on the matter. “You’ve got Grandmaster Flash in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Run-D.M.C. in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?” Simmons asked. “You’re killing me! That doesn’t mean those aren’t good artists. But they don’t play guitar. They sample, and they talk, not even sing… If you don’t play guitar and you don’t write your own songs, you don’t belong there.” This is precisely the mindset the Rock Hall should avoid, and seems to be trying to—slowly.
Chic, Joan Jett: Nominator Favorites
In this year’s class, there are also a few examples of amends-making, both on the part of the nomination committee and hopefully, the voters. Funk and disco pioneers Chic, nominated now for the ninth time, may finally catch their break, two years after frontman Nile Rodgers achieved millennial relevancy via Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” Chic is a band not totally understood or given its due credit in the mainstream; it took a long time for disco to be reclaimed by rock fans, if it ever really has been. It’s clear the nomination committee badly wants Rodgers in, but the voters remain skeptical, despite Rodgers’ impressive behind-the-scenes career as a producer and sideman (Bowie, Madonna, Duran Duran). The nominators show their agenda by continually putting someone on the ballot; The Stooges (Class of 2010) took eight nominations over a 13-year period, while Patti Smith required seven years straight until she was inducted in 2007. Considering how long it took for Smith to make it in, I am not hopeful for Joan Jett, who’s nominated for a third time this year after a one-year hiatus on the nominating committee’s part.
Bill Withers: the Singer/Songwriter Inductee
On the flip side of nomination committee favorite Rodgers sits Bill Withers, who has never once been nominated in his 18 years of eligibility. There are a few obvious reasons for Withers’ lack of consideration, though they’re mostly weak: he’s been out of the limelight for decade, and his biggest hits, 1971’s “Ain’t No Sunshine” and 1972's “Lean On Me,” are not indicative of the chameleon quality evident in his impressive discography. Withers was not easily marketed or contained by just one genre; he mixed soul, R&B, and the blues. Furthermore, his brand circled more around being a singer/songwriter type, rather than a smooth, charismatic performer like his long-inducted contemporary, Al Green (Class of 1995). This singer/songwriter quality is precisely what will work in his favor now with the Rock Hall, as there is often one inductee per class that fits this mold (Cat Stevens in 2014, Randy Newman in 2013, so on and so forth).
Sting, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Underdogs
Among the rest of the nominees—Sting, Stevie Ray Vaughan, War, The Spinners, The Marvelettes, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band—their chances are in order from best to worst here. Sting was inducted with The Police in 2003, so it’s clear he’s already “Rock Hall material” in the eyes of the voters (not to mention he is an Important Personality still). First-time nominee Stevie Ray Vaughan has a trifecta of qualifications going for him: somewhat unsung guitar hero who died young. It’s just a matter of when he gets in, not if.
Three-time nominee War makes the cut if the other funk band, Chic, does not. War has one slight leg-up over Chic, and it is that there’s no disco association with their brown-eyed soul. Though wildly different in sound, 70s R&B vocal group The Spinners, 60s girl-group The Mavelettes, and Muddy Waters mentee Paul Butterfield (and his Blues Band) share one commonality: low brand visibility and little longterm staying power within an all-around strong nomination class. None of these acts have seen the necessary resurgence in recent years to remind voters of what made them influential, though the nomination committee seems to disagree on the four-times-nominated Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Accounting for Taste and Looking Ahead
No matter which way the voting goes this year, what the Rock Hall does in the next several years—particularly in the nomination committee, which must lead the progress even more than the voters—will determine its future relevancy. Though there are many deeply passionate and well-rounded music fans who can’t, for the life of them, understand why anyone gives a shit about this made-up organization, the larger public does still care about the Rock Hall’s opinion of good art. I understand the skepticism: some listeners’ personal relationships with music revolve around losing themselves in it, and digging for sounds that differentiate them from the pack. Particularly among the younger generations who don’t necessarily feel instant nostalgia for classic rock, there’s a need to see that the Rock Hall is investing in more than obvious choices for their induction classes.
Taste needs to be considered in an all-inclusive way that doesn’t seem preferential to any one worldview or definition of rock and roll. It’s not enough for genres or movements to be included via their most successful acts (think: Blondie to represent New Wave, but no Devo). Every act considered for the ballot, and subsequently the Hall, must stand on its own merits. It’s less about a well-rounded induction class in the moment, and more about a well-rounded Rock Hall.
My advice to both the Hall’s nomination committee and voting body: consider what the surplus currently is—classic rockers—and use future classes to be more inclusive overall, particularly as the eligibility moves into wildly divergent times (the 1990s and the 2000s). Imagine being a child and going to the Rock Hall, touching your tiny hand to the hallway filled with inductee signatures. What music do we absolutely need to impart to these kids, some of whom will go on to play music professional and/or facilitate the industry around it? The answer is always going to be subjective, but going wider is never going to hurt.
Follow Jillian Mapes on Twitter @jumonsmapes
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