The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Should Not Exist
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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other. I assumed that I had turned to CNN and was watching its ebullient, occasionally shouty business and aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. I wasn’t even close: It was Roger Daltrey of the Who, and he was excitedly introducing the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton in a condensed version of the October ceremony.
Frampton’s music was, for a moment in the 1970s, the soundtrack to my misspent teenage nights; on the broadcast, Keith Urban joined him to perform his megahit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and I remembered every word. And Frampton seems like a man who is genuinely loved by his peers. It was a nice moment. But when 80-year-old Daltrey—who, at 21, famously sang, “Hope I die before I get old”—is introducing a man whose biggest hits were produced nearly 50 years ago, it’s a reminder that the entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concept is utterly wrongheaded.
As the saying goes, good writers borrow, and great writers steal. I was once a professor, however, and professors give attribution, so let me rely on John Strausbaugh, who wrote a wonderful 2001 jeremiad against Boomer music nostalgia, Rock ’Til You Drop, to explain why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shouldn’t exist: Because it’s “as true to the spirit of rock’n’roll as a Hard Rock Cafe—one in which there are way too many children and you can’t get a drink.”
The Hall of Fame is about old and dead people; rock’n’roll is about the young and living. The Hall of Fame tries to reform rock’n’roll, tame it, reduce it to bland, middle-American family entertainment; it drains all the sexiness and danger and rebelliousness out of it …
Strasbaugh winces especially hard at the Rock Hall tradition of “honoring” classic acts by “dragging their old butts out onto a stage” and then making them “go through the motions one more time” as they pretend to feel the music the same way they did when they were kids. Writing almost 25 years ago, he said that the Rolling Stones were way past their retirement clock, and that Cher in her late-1990s performances “was so stiff in her makeup and outfits, that she looked like a wax effigy of herself.”
Last year, the Rolling Stones went on tour again and were sponsored by—I am serious—the AARP.
And Cher was also just inducted into the Rock Hall in October, at 78 years old. When you’re asking Cher to suit up so that she can be lauded by the young-enough-to-be-her-granddaughter Dua Lipa, you may be trying to honor the artist, but you’re mostly just reminding everyone about the brutal march of time.
I am sometimes blistered on social media for my bad music takes, and I will confess that with some exceptions, I didn’t really develop much of a taste in music beyond the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Top 40 ear candy until I was in college. (My musical soul was saved, or at least improved, by the old WBCN in Boston and by my freshman-dorm neighbor at Boston University, who introduced me to Steely Dan.) But you don’t need a refined taste in music to cringe when a bunch of worthies from the music industry assemble each year to make often nonsensical choices about what constitutes “rock and roll” and who did it well enough to be lionized for the ages. Look, I sort of like some of those old Cher hits from the ’70s—“Train of Thought” is an underrated little pop gem, in my view—but Cher as an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? If she, and Bobby Darin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Woody Guthrie, and Willie Nelson are all “rock,” what isn’t?
This is where I must also admit that I’ve never been to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or even to Cleveland, for that matter. But I’d argue that seeing it all up close—as Strausbaugh notes in his book, it’s full of this rock artist once wore this shirt and that rock artist once touched this mic stand—isn’t the point. Trying to trap the energy and spirit of youthful greatness behind the ice in some sort of Fortress of Rock Solitude is nothing more than a monument to nostalgia. Worse, it’s an ongoing tribute not to music, but to capitalism. Perhaps the music business was always a business, but most rock and roll was about opposing the establishment, not asking for a nice table at its Chamber of Commerce ceremonies.
Don’t get me wrong: I love both rock music and capitalism. I am also prone to a fair amount of my own nostalgia, and I will pay to see some of my favorite elderly stars get up onstage, wink at the audience, and pull out a few of their famous moves—as long as they do it with the kind of self-awareness that makes it more like a visit with an old friend than a soul-crushing pastiche of days gone by.
But even when a return to the stage is done with taste, age can still take its toll on both the performer and the audience: I’m now in my 60s, and as much as I liked seeing Peter Frampton get a big round of applause, I didn’t feel warm or happy; I just felt old, because he was obviously old. (Frampton has an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, so he had to sit to perform his arena anthem.) And when Keith Urban is playing along as the representative of the younger generation at 56 years old, it makes me feel a certain kind of pity for people who gave me the musical landscape of my youth.
Maybe America doesn’t need to commercialize every Boomer memory. Artists become eligible for the Rock Hall 25 years from the release date of their first commercial recording, but rock can’t be distilled in 25-year batches like some sort of rare whiskey. Rock is more like … well, sex. Each generation has to experience it for themselves; later, each generation thinks they invented it; eventually, we all realize that no generation can fully explain their feelings about it to the next one.
Speaking of sex and rebellion, one of the best arguments against the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is that Warren Zevon isn’t in it. His continuing exclusion is one of the great ongoing controversies of the selection process, but the point is not that Zevon should be in it; rather, the question is whether Zevon would ever want to be honored in such a place. The man who wrote “Play It All Night Long” and “Mr. Bad Example” simply doesn’t belong on a pedestal next to Mary J. Blige and Buffalo Springfield. And that’s reason enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist at all.
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