Why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should be ‘burnt to the ground’
Upon receiving word in early May of her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Kate Bush would have been justified in thinking, “Why now?” Never mind a body of work that is richly deserving of its place among the great and the loud, the timing is peculiar. Not only has the 64-year old been eligible for entry since 2003 – a quarter of a century after the release of her first record, Wuthering Heights – but the last time she issued any new music at all was more than a decade ago. It’s almost as if the decision hinged solely on the inclusion last year of the song Running Up That Hill in the fourth season of the Netflix series Stranger Things.
Despite regarding itself as a noble arbiter of artistic worth, the Hall of Fame is in fact a country club for a once disreputable movement. Founded in 1983 with the help of Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun, its initial roster of inductees included such founding mothers and fathers as Aretha Franklin and Jerry Lee Lewis. In the intervening decades, however, an increasingly secretive admissions policy has proved consistently controversial. Decisions are made according to the tenets of a groupthink to which music industry insiders are particularly prone.
Understanding how artists become inductees is akin to discovering how Popes are chosen. Roughly speaking, though, each year a list of 15 nominees chosen by a committee of two-dozen or more industry titans – said to include Steven Van Zandt, Questlove and Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke – is whittled down to five successful entrants by a body of many hundreds of unnamed “rock experts” (including writers and executives, as well as every living past inductee) whose anonymity is protected so as to avoid lobbying.
As if this weren’t quite ship-shape enough, the democratic integrity of a parallel “fan vote” introduced in 2012 is at least equal to that of a general election in Belarus.
Predictably, its detractors are many. “Let’s go to Cleveland, where the museum itself is located, and burn the place to the ground,” wrote the journalist Dave Bry in 2016. “The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is the worst arts institution in America. Its establishment… [is] the worst idea anyone’s ever come up with concerning [modern music].” Cleveland itself was nominated as the home for a permanent museum on the grounds of it being the city in which DJ Alan Freed popularised the term rock’n’roll. Less than a decade later, in 1962, Freed was found guilty of multiple counts of commercial bribery.
Its admissions policy differs in one key aspect from the North American sporting museums on which it is modelled. Whereas Wayne Gretzky’s place in the [ice] Hockey Hall of Fame is predicated on him having scored more goals than any other player in history, the inclusion of, say, The Dave Clark Five in its musical equivalent is harder to evaluate. Not everyone is grateful for the nod, either. In a predictable outburst, the Sex Pistols described the annual induction ceremony as being like “urine in wine”. More surprising was the refusal of Mark Knopfler to attend the induction of his former group Dire Straits. “He just didn’t feel like coming,” bassist John Illsley told the audience at 2018’s jamboree. “It’s as simple as that”.
In fact, for a bunch of ostensibly well-mannered dad-rockers, Dire Straits caused no end of grief. Explaining his own decision not to appear at the ceremony, original rhythm guitarist David Knopfler accused the Hall of Fame of reneging on promises to help fund his travel expenses. “I can well understand that with only $5 mil a year in sponsorships and [$100,000 for] a table, and no fees for the artist, that paying my taxi to the airport must have given them heart murmurs,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Expressing adjacent concerns, Steve Miller remarked that “when they told me I was inducted they said, ‘You have two tickets – one for your wife and one for yourself. Want another one? It’s $10,000. Sorry, that’s the way it goes.’”
More substantively, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has attracted plenty of criticism for its spotty record regarding matters of representation. Since 1986, across its four categories – performers, non-performers, early influencers and lifetime achievement - fewer than 10 per cent of inductees have been female.
The omissions can often be eye-catching. Following the death of Donna Summer, in 2012, Elton John lambasted the institution for failing to acknowledge the singer while she was alive. “That she has never been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a total disgrace,” he said, “especially when I see the second-rate talent that has been inducted.” Certainly, it can sometimes seem as if the only average white band not to have been invited into the winners’ enclosure are the Average White Band themselves.
When it comes to honouring artists of colour, in the 21st Century the Hall of Fame has tended to undermine its own commendable record – a record that saw Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles and Little Richard among the first inductees – by being caught routinely flat-footed by emerging movements that threaten its established order.
For the longest time, its panel of experts have regarded hip hop, in particular, as one might a rattlesnake in a bathtub. Even in 2023, the year in which the movement celebrates its 50th birthday, Missy Elliot is the only rap-adjacent inductee to make the list.
“As its very name implies, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has been criticised over the decades for being slow to accept and embrace acts outside of the rock genre,” wrote NBC’s Eric Hinton in 2021. “And no musical category has suffered more in this respect than rap music.” That artists of the calibre of Nas, Snoop Dogg and Ice-T have thus far been excluded casts the decision-making council as a cobwebbed body far more comfortable with the music of Eric Clapton than that of Erik B & Rakim.
It might be said, of course, that in an age when rock’n’roll’s most weatherworn faces are happily charging ticket prices equivalent to a foreign holiday, an organisation as explicitly elitist as this is bound to lose touch with its street-smarts. In truth, though, the Hall of Fame has only ever been interested in music that finds its way into its own back yard. Were it otherwise, Cliff Richard, a genuine pioneer for whom success in the United States has proved elusive, would have been honoured decades ago. Bands and artists from Canada would number more than six.
Elsewhere, good old-fashioned musical snobbery lies at the heart of an evident distaste for bands who give it some welly. While alumnus such as Deep Purple and Kiss waited decades for an invite to the party, stadium-botherers and hell-raisers Motley Crue have been snubbed for almost 20-years on account, its members believe, of having brought shame to rock’n’roll’s otherwise pristine reputation for moral probity. As bassist Nikki Sixx explained to Kerrang!: “We were told… that we would never get in, because of how we’ve acted.”
Which isn’t to say that Hall of Fame itself is anything less than adept when it comes to throwing a party. Almost every year, each November, its star-strewn ceremony throws up such delights as Rob Halford, from Judas Priest, singing Jolene with Dolly Parton, or Green Day deputising for the Ramones. Whether its Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel or Bruce Springsteen, few are the artists who decline the invitation to put themselves on display.
But away from the baubles and bonhomie, perhaps wiser minds remain wary of so much gilded respectability. As Bruce Dickinson, frontman with the perennially overlooked Iron Maiden once noted: “If we’re ever inducted, I will refuse – they won’t bloody be having my corpse in there.”
