It’s National Which-One-Doesn’t-Fit Day, that day that comes once a year when the so-called Rock & Roll Hall of Fame pisses off the Western world by announcing it’s new members. Okay, who among the following doesn’t fit? … AC/DC, Green Day, Hank Williams, Donna Summer, Frank Zappa, N.W.A., Nat King Cole or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five? When you try to be all things to all people, you end up with an identity crisis that makes you no one to everyone. The Rock Hall has hopelessly lost its way and at this point has no idea what it’s doing.
The problem, of course, is that no one can agree on the definition of rock & roll. Perhaps when the idea was first hatched things were a bit clearer. The first group of inductees, inducted on January 23, 1986, included Elvis Presley, James Brown, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis and these performers seemed to have a lot in common, namely, a heavy beat and simple melodies and, essentially, an amalgam of black rhythm and blues and white country music – rock & roll.
But years ago the Rock Hall wandered away from its roots and became the bastard child of the politically-correct movement. It wanted to be inclusive, it wanted to reach out to a broader audience and encompass musical genres far beyond what we know as rock and roll. And all of that is fine, lots of people sell out to social pressure and the almighty dollar, but at the moment they decided to become something other than rock, on that day they chose to be a musical chameleon, they needed to surrender the rock & roll name. But they didn’t, so now what you have is an unnecessary culture clash with rock people looking like out-of-touch racists because they’re upset when they see their rock acts bypassed in favor of jazz singers, and hip-hop fans are mad at seeing their seminal acts being shunned to make room for what they see as old, middle-of-the-road rock acts.
The Rock Hall has alienated everybody because it lost sight of who they said they were and because they created a gray area that has now taken on a life of its own. It kinda went like this, you had an organization that professed to be rock, but then one day, out of nowhere, they decided to induct (for example) Mozart. It was weird but it was fuckin’ Mozart, so everyone looked the other way. Years later this placed called the Rock Hall continues to induct members but no one else like Mozart until one year they induct Kiss. Now the Mozart crowd is up in arms, “How can you induct Kiss before Beethoven?” The people who like Kiss say, “Beethoven’s not even a rock act!” and the classical dudes say, “Who cares, in a musical contest how can Kiss ever beat out Beethoven?” And so it was that induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame become a comparison of apples and oranges due to the ineptness of the Rock Hall.
All forms of music deserve a place where they can celebrate their popular acts and culture. To have a dedicated hall of fame for each genre is perhaps impractical, but that all forms of music get shoved into something called rock & roll simply creates unnecessary division and angst.
So I’ve decided to change the name of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to the Noise & Sound Hall of Fame. Catchy, right? Certainly, you can’t call all forms of music roll and rock and, frankly, you can’t call all kinds of music music. I think your music is noise, you think my music is racket, we can agree to disagree. In the Noise & Sound, anything goes, each musical flavor gets its own wing and each year they can pick a couple of new members and party amongst themselves.
And since we’ve broadened things beyond rock & roll, and even beyond music, we can recognize groups of people whose contributions have long been overlooked. We can induct cavemen because their bone-against-the-cave-wall playing was epic and whistlers because the lips are instruments too, and yodellers and guys that bang on plastic pails in the subway station and dudes who hit their knees with spoons.
Ozzie says, “You can’t kill rock & roll,” but I’ll be damned if the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame doesn’t try to once a year.