The ballots have been counted and it’s been announced that this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees will be Nirvana, KISS, Hall & Oats, Peter Gabriel, Linda Ronstadt and Cat Stevens. While it’s hard to argue with the quality of work of these fine artists (they’re all well deserving of recognition), I still keep coming back to the same question – Do we really need a rock and roll hall of fame?
I base this premise on a number of observations. For one thing, the merits of the arts are nearly impossible to quantify. Many a movie, television show, album or piece of artwork that does big sales numbers may not have what’s widely believed to be much in the way of artistic merit, but then again, who’s to say? As the proverb goes, “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.” What I might see as art might have you shouting it down as crass hacksmanship, or vice versa. And when it comes to affecting the art of others, what influences you might have absolutely no effect on me.
So if you can’t quantify it or judge it by the moving target of influence, how about longevity? Here again, just because you’ve managed to survive in the business for 25 years (as is the requirement of all Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees) doesn’t necessarily mean that you were great during that period, only good enough to survive. You may wind up being widely known by your public visibility over time, but does that qualify someone for any kind of hall of fame?
Actually hall of fames in general are fraught with problems and all are filled with controversy. Perhaps sports is best equipped to handle a hall of fame since induction can be based on performance statistics. In baseball, for instance, if a pitcher has accumulated 300 wins or a batter has 500 home runs during the course of his career, his entrance into the Baseball Hall of Fame used to be automatic before the steroid era skewed the numbers. Can you do the same with music? Not as easily.
Does selling 20 million copies of an album or getting 500 million YouTube views or Spotify streams qualify you for nomination? Do it every year for ten years and you might have an argument, but as it is, clearly (and thankfully), no. We’ve seen recent big sellers like Psy, Carly Rae Jepsen and Gotye make a huge splash then disappear into near obscurity. And speaking of Psy, if he qualifies for the K-Pop Hall of Fame because of his popularity in Korea, would that mean he qualifies for the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as well (should they ever choose to include K-Pop)? Or would Justin Bieber qualify because of his music sales and massive YouTube views? If you’re a 13 year old girl, probably, but I bet the answer would be a resounding “No” for most adults. So being able to quantify music fame via sales numbers doesn’t work either.
In the end, I’m not sure that there can be a truly successful Hall of Fame for any branch of the arts. Everything in art is so individual that it seems almost arbitrary when it comes to the eye of the beholder. The phrase, “I don’t know why I like it, but I do,” holds as much weight as any scholarly tome on the subject. Until there’s a better way to quantify taste, perhaps we should see the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame only for what it is and nothing more – a nice way to honor some well-known artists from days gone by. Just let’s not rank them over other artists until we have some way to prove it.
