My Problem with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

All the greatest artists are already in there. We are now scraping the second- and third-tier just for the sake of ushering in new names to a nonsensical institution.

By now maybe you have heard about this year’s inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Fourteen artists were nominated, and of those, seven will be formally inducted to the Cleveland-based museum on Friday, November 3, in a ceremony that will take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. (A few years ago, the R&RHoF elders wisely decided to move the annual induction ceremony out of Cleveland, spreading it around between Los Angeles and New York City, presumably to gain more media coverage and to provide a more exciting location than – sorry, Ohioans – Cleveland.)

Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, George Michael, Rage Against the Machine, Missy Elliott, the Spinners, and Kate Bush will be honored with plaques in a rotunda in Cleveland. Pundits have pointed out that there are very few rock artists on this list – Nelson is a country singer; Crow is a pop-rock artist; Missy Elliott is a rapper; the Spinners were a 1970s vocal R&B group; Kate Bush is most often categorized as art-pop; and George Michael was a soulful pop singer. The only act that can really be considered “rock” is Rage Against the Machine, whose music is powered by loud electric guitars, dynamic bass and drums, and in-your-face vocals.

I don’t have a problem with the Hall of Fame widening its embrace to include rock-adjacent artists and genres. I do have two problems with the entire enterprise, however.

For one, who cares? I sure don’t. I couldn’t care less about the Rock Hall of Fame, or, for that matter, for any of the self-congratulatory industry trade awards, including the Grammys, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Oscars. Actually, I suppose I could care less, as I care even less about the Golden Globes and the People’s Choice awards and the like. The peoples’ choices are easy to tally: just add up box office figures for movies and plays and musicals, and Nielsen ratings and streaming and download tallies for TV shows and music and movies, too. Those are direct indications of popularity, or “the peoples’ choice,” which perennially recognizes mediocrity above all as the greatest value. The trade awards rarely recognize quality of any sort, but more often than not acknowledge commercial success along with political concerns and sentimentality. But mostly, these awards simply provide the entertainment industry with an opportunity to milk extra coverage for its products, giving them an extra bump in sales (although this is not guaranteed). If I look anywhere for guidance about what is “best” in any given year in any given art form, it tends to be awards voted on by critics: the Mercury Prize for music in the UK; the National Book Critics’ Circle in the US; and the various tallies of critics’ top ten lists. (I realize that the Golden Globes are bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but in practice they are indistinguishable from the Oscars.)

But if I did care – and I do need something to write about here, so I am trying to raise my hackles about this – if I did care about the Rock & Roll of Fame (despite the absurd notion of such an institution), my argument against it is that, as with those peoples’ choice awards, it tends to reward mediocrity. Not because those who vote do not have good taste – I am guessing that many of them do – but because, let’s face it: after the first decade or so of inducting the true innovators of rock ‘n’ roll, once you get past artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, and their immediate successors, including the Who, the Kinks, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Marvin Gaye, the Clash, David Bowie, and Radiohead, there are not a lot of artists that stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the true greats. Once they have all been enshrined, those remaining, while in many cases worthy of praise and recognition, are second-rate compared to the founders and innovators of the form.

I like Sheryl Crow just fine, probably more than I should. I have seen her in concert a few times, opening for the Rolling Stones and on a memorable double-bill with the Wallflowers. But I would not put her in the same league with the Stones or Joni Mitchell, and to do so merely diminishes the value of what it means to be in the Hall of Fame. Same goes for the Spinners. They were indeed one of my favorite R&B vocal groups of the 1970s. “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love”? “One of a Kind (Love Affair)”? “Mighty Love”? “Then Came You”? “Game People Play”? “I’ll Be Around”? “The Rubberband Man”? I loved those songs. Still do. But really, their success was equally or mostly due to their songwriters and producers. And they did not stand out particularly from similar groups of the day, like the O’Jays, the Stylistics, or the Temptations.

George Michael? He is already a musical punch-line. Missy Elliott? Honestly, I don’t know about her. Willie Nelson? Yes, a giant! I can’t believe he wasn’t inducted in the first or second round back in the mid-1980s. Kate Bush? A weirdo-genius, perhaps, but can you imagine rock history without her? Of course you can. As far as Rage Against the Machine – the only rock band to be inducted this year – goes, again, even with their heightened political consciousness and guitarist Tom Morello’s stint with Bruce Springsteen, they are simply not in the same league as the Clash. They are a minor-league band attaining a spot in the major leagues simply because all the worthy groups have already been inducted and those who get nominated these days are almost entirely second- or third-tier artists.

It is hard for me to get all riled up or outraged about any of this, because, as I said previously (several times), I just don’t care. Should the often-overlooked and much-beloved-by-music-nerds Warren Zevon be in the rock hall? Of course he should. But let’s be real about it for a moment. He was no Bob Dylan (although Dylan was one of his most ardent fans and champions). He may not even have been a Randy Newman, who, much to my surprise (and delight), was inducted into the Hall in 2013.

I am not saying that there can never be another artist who ranks with the originals. There are probably a few already in our midst. And I hope as much as anyone that a new Beatles, a new Bowie, a new Clash will revolutionize rock-based popular music as much as those artists did, investing it with newfound energy and vitality – enough to make me care again.