The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is stupid

I'll get it right out of the way off the bat.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is stupid in every possible way.

It's a museum created by Jann Wenner and others of his era to celebrate the music of their childhoods - not the music of today but rather the music that they remembered from when they were younger.  The Rock Hall says things a little differently, but...

In 1983, A small group of music industry professionals led by Atlantic Records Founder and Chairman Ahmet Ertegun and including Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, attorney Allen Grubman, manager Jon Landau and record executives Seymour Stein, Bob Krasnow along with attorney Suzan Evans set out to establish an organization to “recognize the people who have created this music which has become the most popular music of our time.”

They had no problems picking the first few inductees - James Brown, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Robert Johnson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Elvis, Sam Phillips, and a few more.  Even years two - Roy Orbison, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Smokey Robinson, Lieber & Stoler, Marvin Gaye, Ahmet Ertegun (on the Hall's Board interestingly) - and three - Beatles, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Les Paul, The Supremes - couldn't have been tough.

But eventually the font of easy inductees dries up.  There isn't a new Bob Dylan to get the crowd excited and united every year.  You end up with Tom Donahue (a SF DJ from the 1960's - hmm...wonder where Rolling Stone  was headquartered around then), The Bee Gees (no rock in their career), Buffalo Springfield (three albums recorded - total), The Young Rascals (seven recording years, only three years as actual commercial forces), Paul McCartney (whose solo output doesn't remotely qualify as good enough - neither does John Lennon's, by the way), Richie Valens (who recorded for less than one year and died at the age of 17), Miles Davis (jazz, yes, rock, not even), the Dave Clark 5 (whose Rock bio says "their records were, quite simply, fun to listen and dance to" - such a ringing endorsement).

And eventually you get around to ABBA and Blondie and Run-DMC and Madonna and Grandmaster Flash.  Great artists?  Probably.  Rock artists?  Not remotely.

I've been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I've been to the Baseball Hall of Fame, too.  Didn't enjoy either one, but really didn't enjoy the Rock one.  They're both museums trying to freeze moments in time and capture glories that were fleeting enough as they happened, but at least the Baseball Hall of Fame had some sort of continuing thread that could tie all of the players together.  They all did basically the same things.  They threw the ball; they caught the ball.  Sometimes they won; sometimes they lost; sometimes it rained.

The Rock HoF, on the other hand, seems to be trying to bring together genres and musicians that are just too disparate.  How can you put the Velvet Underground in the same hall of fame with Elvis Presley and the Tom Waits and the Sex Pistols and Madonna?  The artists are so different, so separated in time, so radically unlike each other that trying to judge them against each other on some sort of quantifiable but qualitative scale just seems ridiculous.

And where do you draw the line at what is and what isn't Rock enough to be included?  Madonna?  ABBA?  Grandmaster Flash?  These aren't Rock artists, but then again, the music of Elvis is probably as far from that of Black Sabbath (2006) as is Madonna (2008) from the Eagles (1998).  There is, at this point anyway, no underlying rockness to most of the inductees that are left because rock isn't the dominant popular force that it once was.  In twenty years, we're going to need to somehow judge whether Daft Punk and the Avett Brothers are both rock enough to make their ways into the Hall's hallowed halls, and by then rock will mean even less as music will have morphed even further.

So, check out this year's inductees...as well as any of these articles complaining about or reporting on the choices...

• Rock Hall announces new inductees
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Neil Diamond's in, Bon Jovi's out
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Bon Jovi's in good company not getting inducted
• 2011 Rock Hall Nominees: Let the head scratching begin
• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees: Who's Who!
• LL Cool J, The Beastie Boys Do Not Make Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees
• More Like 'Hall of Lame', Am I Right?
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Who Should Be in for 2011 and the Future?
• Rock And Roll Hall of Fame's Most Egregious Snubs
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: the Outcasts
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees: Who Should Get In, Who Got Overlooked?
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Could Change Induction Criteria to Suit Bigger Acts
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Candidates: a critic's elite eight
• Future Rock Legends (an entire website devoted to looking at who does and doesn't deserve to be inducted...see also, navel gazing)

All I can promise you is these two things:

• I will never discuss the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame again other than perhaps to shake my head and move on.  The choices that they make are irrelevant to my musical listening pleasure.
• I will not be going to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame under my own free choice again.  It's boring.

Oh, and I promise that none of this has to do with the fact that they passed over the greatest Jewish rappers in history.  Another genre ignored...

PS - The Baseball Hall of Fame, on the other hand, is fascinating and may soon have a major backlog.