In April, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its 2025 slate of annual inductees, generating the now-perfunctory reactions that greet such news: disdain or exasperated relief combined with vague irritation at the Hall’s very existence, of which, cicada-like, we are reminded each year around this time.
The first two responses are fairly straightforward. The disdain stems from the admission of unworthy candidates, and the exasperated relief from the tardy admission of worthy ones. Nearly 40 years since its inaugural ceremony, one of these inevitably describes just about every nominee. The critic Bill Wyman notes in his highly entertaining ranked list of inductees, which doubles as a handy pocket history of the Hall, that it is now in its “pet rock era,” mining nostalgia from increasingly minor musicians. By now, it is either scraping the bottom of the barrel or rectifying long-standing omissions.
When it comes to the former, this year’s choices are at least less egregious than last year’s, which included such luminaries as Peter Frampton, Foreigner, Cher, and the Dave Matthews Band. The Hall also finally saw fit to recognize the great singer-songwriter and all-around wild man Warren Zevon, though in a rather backhanded appraisal, he was only admitted under the “musical influence” rather than the standard “performer” category. I confess to being flummoxed by this designation, as musical influence is notionally a major criterion for any entrant to the Hall.
But it is a third type of response that is perhaps most interesting, which is something like irritation at the very institution itself, even as one cannot help caviling about its particular decisions. This irritation is not solely traceable to the fundamental absurdity of the institution. It is beside the point by now to observe that a “hall of fame” is antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise, much less one set in Cleveland, a city that no one on Earth previously associated with rock and roll. It rather has to do with the peculiarity of this particular musical and cultural form, and rock is surely both, for there is something paradoxical about attempts to enshrine an art form that is intrinsically ephemeral and demotic. What does doing so actually accomplish? Sure, I am personally pleased to see Zevon get honored this year, especially if it leads to more people listening to “Lawyers, Guns and Money” or “Desperados Under the Eaves.” But it hardly affects one’s enjoyment of the music.
Or, let’s take another example. One of the most conspicuous omissions from the Hall to this day is New Order, the highly influential and innovative dance-rock band most famous for their slew of brilliant singles that has a strong claim to be the band of the 1980s. It is more likely than not that this minor injustice will eventually be rectified, and on that day, almost nothing will change. “Temptation” and “True Faith” will remain classic expressions of inchoate longing just as they are today.
And there is something rather … petty about those who clamor excessively for these formal recognitions, isn’t there? After all, it is not the Hall that confers legitimacy upon the rock artists it inducts, but the other way around. And of course it is! What kind of person possibly accords greater authority to the mostly anonymous board members of the Hall and its various associated industry reptiles than to the titans of 20th-century culture? Literally no one, I’ll wager, was unsure of what they thought about, say, James Brown until a formal institution built on the model of an establishment dedicated to the history of baseball, a cultural treasure that is profoundly unlike rock music in key ways, was established to honor him. This raises the key problems with a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame existing in the first place. First, it signals, like the founding of the genre of “classic rock” radio in the ’80s, the end of the rock ethos as a live cultural force. And second, like so many awards shows, it involves a sort of fraud about the direction in which the honor flows. In honoring Brown, the culture mavens gathered in Cleveland were really, of course, honoring themselves by association. This is, in fact, the quintessential boomer dynamic, and the Hall is very much a boomer creation, being partly the brainchild of Rolling Stone magazine founder and quintessential boomer Jann Wenner. This was a generation that defined itself not just by its experience as spectators but by assigning that spectator status some sort of world-historical significance.
Having grown up, that generation wished to assign not just greater historical but greater artistic merit to their defining cultural touchstones. And here, an institution like the Hall of Fame collapses under the weight of its conceptual tensions. Such an institution is, after all, designed to be exclusive and discriminating — to assign rank to the worthiest of designees. But, of course, rock and roll is perhaps the quintessential popular art form. “Roll Over Beethoven”? From the start, it gleefully thumbed its nose at all manner of stuffy, elite shibboleths, which is part of why it was embraced by the postwar youth demographic in the first place. Rock’s ability to appall and enrage one’s elders, from Elvis to Eminem, both of whom are in the Hall, has historically been a huge part of its appeal.
Rock’s generally lowbrow ethos is not just a matter of style but substance, with its reliance on uncomplicated rhythms and primal chords, from Bo Diddley to the Ramones. This stuff gets tricky, of course — it’s not entirely easy to explain why, for example, ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears” is brilliantly dumb, whereas anything by Journey is merely dumb. But in any case, the collapse of nearly all traditional establishments is correlated with the collapse of rock’s own raison d’etre, which is why its adherents either retreat into a nostalgic past when this stuff still had some power to shock or insist against all reason that popular art forms still have to contend with some sort of sneering elite beau monde.
ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN, WHO IS A CIRCLE
Hence, the Hall of Fame is still obliged to pay deference to the most popular exponents of this popular art form, even as it arrogates to itself the authority to designate the great practitioners of their art. Which is why, today, the very popular but also cosmically great Beatles share space with the very popular but not at all great KISS. So, what was meant to be a monument to a great art form turns out to be an absurdity of a museum-like Hall that wants to be all things to all people. Because rock does not want to be, and properly understood cannot be appreciated as, a great art form.
None of this is necessarily to insist that demotic art forms cannot have standards. An artist can appeal, in a variety of both musical and nonmusical ways, to the credentialing institutions of his culture. But isn’t it somehow in the nature of this specifically democratic form that its quality assessment remains informal and dispersed? The Hall will keep putting on its multimillion-dollar performances. And the inductors, many of whom hope one day to become inductees themselves, engage in displays of sycophancy that would make a French courtier blanch. The curators of a waning culture overwrite their own history by admitting ever more marginal figures into their ranks. But what will it matter? The rock lover knows in his heart and his soul that someone such as Warren Zevon has always belonged in the Hall, and so many others enshrined there now and in the future never, ever will.
David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. Find him at strangefrequencies.co.