Courtney Love calls out Rock and Roll Hall of Fame over lack of women and black artists
Heather Hunter
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Rock star Courtney Love excoriated the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in an opinion piece, calling the music organization’s nomination and induction practices “sexist gatekeeping.”
“If so few women are being inducted into the Rock Hall, then the nominating committee is broken,” Love wrote in a piece on Friday in The Guardian titled “Why are women so marginalized by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”
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The lead singer of the 1990s band “Hole” suggested that the induction system needs an overhaul because only a small percentage of inductees are female.
“Barely 8% of its inductees are female. The canon-making doesn’t just reek of sexist gate-keeping, but also purposeful ignorance and hostility,” she wrote.
She chastised it for initially inducting all men: Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley.
Love explained that this year’s nominations of Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, Cyndi Lauper, Meg White of the White Stripes, and Gillian Gilbert of New Order are merely an “annual reminder of just how extraordinary a woman must be to make it into the ol’ boys club.” She suggested these “legendary women” had to “cool their jets waiting to be noticed.”
She said this year’s nominee, Kate Bush, could have been inducted in 2004, but it was not until recently that they decided to add “the first woman in pop history to have written every track on a million-selling debut.”
“It took the Rock Hall 30-plus years to induct Nina Simone and Carole King. Linda Ronstadt released her debut in 1969 and became the first woman to headline stadiums, yet she was inducted alongside Nirvana in 2014. Most egregiously, Tina Turner was inducted as a solo artist three decades after making the grade alongside her abuser, Ike,” Love said.
“Why are women so marginalized by the Rock Hall?” she asked.
Love remarked that only nine of the 31 people on the nominating board are women.
“You can write the Rock Hall off as a ‘boomer tomb’ and argue that it is building a totem to its own irrelevance. Why should we care who is in and who is not? But as scornful as its inductions have been, the Rock Hall is a bulwark against erasure, which every female artist faces whether they long for the honour or want to spit on it. It is still game recognising game, history made and marked,” she said.
The songwriter called “the bar” for men to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame “demonstrably lower.”
Love further ripped the Rock Hall’s celebration of Women’s History Month by their focus on a female artist’s “stagewear” rather than their music.
She gave credit to the rock museum as being a “king-making force in the global music industry” and for having “a sheen of gravitas and longevity that the Grammys do not have.” However, she still maintained that their “canon-making doesn’t just reek of sexist gatekeeping.”
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Love also made claims of racism by the museum for inducting the Beastie Boys in 2012 “ahead of most of the Black hip-hop artists they learned to rhyme from.”
“If so few Black artists, so few women of colour, are being inducted, then the voting process needs to be overhauled. Music is a lifeforce that is constantly evolving – and they can’t keep up. Shame on HBO for propping up this farce,” Love wrote in The Guardian on Friday.