The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame can be counted on to spark two annual debates: one when the nominees are announced and another when the narrower list of inductees are revealed. The second debate got underway last week when we learned that Missy Elliott, Willie Nelson, Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, George Michael, Rage Against the Machine, and The Spinners were voted in. The first question on many rock fans’ minds: Hey, why not Warren Zevon?
The answer lies in the Rock Hall’s dual nature: It’s a tourist attraction and a source for TV content, and at the same time, it’s (ideally, at least) a representation of rock’s musical values. Sometimes those two purposes align, sometimes they don’t. And when the latter happens, we get the kinds of debates that find music fans arguing over who got in the Rock Hall merely because they’re famous, and who actually changed the landscape of rock.
The live wire under those debates, of course, is taste. We all like to think the bands we love are good, meaningful, and meritorious of a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The problem is that many in the Hall seem important merely because they were successful, while many who made actual contributions to rock music weren’t broadly popular. It took the Early Influences Award to get seminal electronic band Kraftwerk in, despite them laying down the blueprint for EDM.
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Perhaps the process would be less contentious if we understood the Rock Hall as two different Halls: one physical and one more ephemeral.
In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s early years, musical innovation and commercial success were celebrated in the same breath. Its first class in 1986 was dominated by the blues and R&B heroes of the ’50s and ’60s, including Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and James Brown. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Beach Boys followed two years later. When the Hall opened as a physical space in 1995 in Cleveland, Ohio, voters still had a healthy menu of well-respected, crowd-pleasing, game-changing musicians to choose from and inducted Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, and The Allman Brothers Band.
But by 2005, the nominee pool was getting shallower. The biggest and only rock acts inducted that year were U2 and The Pretenders. The next year saw the induction of Black Sabbath, Blondie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and The Sex Pistols, while 2007 gave us R.E.M., Patti Smith, and Van Halen. The first signs of fragmentation in the monoculture that we saw in the late ’70s were finding their way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and top sellers who also made important contributions to rock music were becoming harder to find as well. Inductee classes were filled out with R&B heroes and people who made significant contributions on the business side, all of which were legit but don’t bring tourists to Cleveland, sell tickets to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for the induction ceremony, or get viewers to watch the televised spectacle on HBO.
In 2013, the Rock Hall gave fans the opportunity to vote, in addition to the music industry professionals and musicians who had voted on inductees to that point. That gave a voice to the people who invested money, identity, and social capital in their favorite bands, and that gave those who voted an even stronger rooting interest in the results. Right away, their vote tacked back to the classic rock sweet spot at a time when the innovation was actually taking place on the musical margins with punk, new wave, and hip-hop, and the top fan vote-getters that year were Rush, Deep Purple, and Heart. That was enough to get Rush and Heart into the Hall of Fame alongside Public Enemy, which enjoyed sales, cred, and acclaim. In 2014, the fan vote helped Kiss, unloved by critics for years, get in as well.
This year, George Michael and Sheryl Crow received the most fan votes among the inductees, and with a legend like Willie Nelson and a beloved act like Rage Against the Machine also in the class, it’s easy to imagine that they’ll help get fans to interact with the Hall and its affiliated products and productions—in other words, the kind of engagement the Rock Hall wants and needs to be profitable.
Meanwhile, the version of the Rock Hall that exists in our heads—the ephemeral one—is populated by people who legitimately made a difference in how music is made or redefined. In this year’s inductee class, the late guitar great Link Wray and hip-hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc fit that bill, but they weren’t voted in; instead, it took a selection committee to give them the Musical Influence Award, which to many fans feels like a consolation prize and doesn’t quite hold the same weight. That’s a shame, considering those two artist’s hefty contributions to music. Wray, for one, made a career of exploring distortion, which influenced generations of guitarists after him to add weight, power, and emotional nuance to their playing. Kool Herc, meanwhile, started the innovative practice of scratching on turntables, which shaped the future of rap.
Fans of those artists wanted to see them voted in, but they couldn’t make it on the popular vote. Nor could Chic or Kraftwerk, whose influence on the sound and direction of dance and electronic music is undeniable. Instead, they were bypassed in favor of Bon Jovi and The Doobie Brothers—two examples of acts that made good, popular music that didn’t affect the course of rock ‘n’ roll history. That’s frustrating because as fans, we want people to share our passions, we want them validated, and we want the honor to be meaningful.
Thinking of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as two Halls in one is a way to say we’re all right. It’s both a statement of values and a commercial proposition. And in that duality, it’s a lot like rock ‘n’ roll itself.
