Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Title of this blog is I Hate Rolling Stone, and it's worth a diversion to say why.  Rolling Stone was co-founded by Jann Wenner, as was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Jann himself was inducted for the Lifetime Achievement Award a few years ago.  By the organization he helped found, and on whose committee he still sits. Way to go.

Anyway, I don't understand why rock and roll needs a hall of fame.  It's a concept that makes sense in sports, where everyone understands (basically) the criteria a player is judged by, and where we know what a good player looks like, basically.  This is somewhat simplified, and there are fantastic arguments about who should or shouldn't get in, but these arguments tend to be about the most marginal cases.  No one argues about whether Willie Mays or Babe Ruth belongs.

Part of the reason this concept doesn't work in music for me is because music is not a zero sum game like sports.  I can like the Beatles without diminishing the Rolling Stones.  While I guess I only have so many dollars to spend, and thus only so many albums to buy, one bands gain is not directly another bands loss.

The second problem is that great rock bands don't look the same, the way great baseball teams or players do.  I love Bob Dylan, but he can leave other people absolutely cold - there's no sports parallel; a basketball player doesn't score thirty points when I'm watching, but only ten when you see him.  Music has no objective measurements.

Finally, the fact of the hall of fame is that there are great bands with long lasting influence, who aren't in.  Black Sabbath made it in three years ago - nearly ten years after they became eligible.  Genesis have just barely been nominated, and ELO still isn't in.


So what's the solution?  We'll always argue about musical tastes, and maybe this just provides another venue for it.  I could accept that, except I feel the institution cements a belief that certain genres of music are inherently incapable of moving people emotionally.  When they said "prog rock" is pretentious, they aren't saying, "this isn't my tastes," "I don't like it," or even "how can you like X band more than Y?  Y is amazing!"  They're saying "no one could feel an emotional connection to that band."

I do feel a connection some of those bands.  A lot of people do.  For me, it's prog. rock.  For someone like Chuck Klosterman, it was eighties metal.  What we have in common is a genuine love of music a dominant group has declared undeserving of genuine love.

So I see three possible solutions.  The first is to reject the concept of a hall of fame.  Rock was never about earning accolades anyway.  The second is to embrace some guidelines, and accept some criteria, however vague, that might give the whole thing a feeling of legitimacy.  And the third is to change our idea of what a rock and roll hall of fame should look like.

Number one is self-explanatory, so let me go to the second.  Bill James gave some guidelines that he thought would be useful for the Baseball Hall of Fame - one of them was (paraphrased) "was x player ever plausibly the best player in the game for their position."  For music, let's put it like this: "Was x band/performer ever plausibly the greatest band in the world."  I'd also add "was x band a major influence on several bands that were ever plausibly the greatest band in the world."  I add that second criterion to include bands that weren't seminal in their time, but became seminal influences on later bands.  So, for example, Cheap Trick would qualify on both accounts - there was a time when Cheap Trick was possibly the biggest band in the world, and they were huge influences on the Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, and several other bands that could themselves make that claim.  Cheap Trick is in.  (Interestingly, guess which band has not been inducted.)

My third criteria is similar, but a bit different.  I think trying to look a band 25 years after their first album doesn't give a great view of the band.  Fleetwood Mac, for example, is in, but aside from Rumours, name me another Mac album.  Okay, I know many of you can, but my point is, most bands aren't great for 25 years.  Most aren't great for anything close to it.  (I have a theory that a truly great band can get somewhere around 10 years on the cutting edge, usually more like 8, and that's it.  More on that tomorrow.)

So I submit, rather than inducting bands, who all tend to have uneven careers, we induct albums.  The album is the basic artistic unit anyway - there really aren't any pure singles bands anymore - and most great bands' reputations rest on a few great albums anyway.

Now you don't have to induct the Sex Pistols, you simply add Never Mind the Bollocks and we all accept that as part of the canon.  True this does have some downsides - it tends to look a bit like those top 500 albums of all time lists Rolling Stone tends to run, and the composition of the hall of fame doesn't change a lot - still 90% 1968-1975.  But I think there's one more thing we need to do, to have everything running beautifully.

Duct tape Jann Wenner's gym socks into his mouth.