Rawk and Rowl Hall of Fame Class 2005

Here it is folks, the 2005 class for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

U2
Percy Sledge
The O'Jays
The Pretenders
Buddy Guy

Seymour Stein will be inducted also.

Prepare for music nerd rant...

While acknowledging that the Hall of Fame is silly and not well organized to consider music... what are the requirements beyond 25 years from first record and success? I have to wonder about some fo the list... The Pretenders???? I love the debut album and some sundry other stuff, but they wouldn't even be on a list of nominees, if I were in charge.

The Pretendres have a pretty thin resume. It is not that a band can't be an all-time great with a small body of work -- for example, The Sex Pistols belong due to extreme historical significance alone -- but a great debut album, only one other undisputedly good album (Learning To Crawl) and otherwise a lot of filler, slack, and inconsistency -- though at some point they just became disposable -- doesn't cut it as belonging in a hall of fame.

Where are the nominations for The Hollies, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, The Monkees, Yes, among other influential artists? (serious or not The Monkees were influential, did write and play some of their own stuff after that first record, made an avant garde film -- Head -- hell Mike Nesmith was one of the first musicians who took video seriously). If you had to think about influence on music and related culture, who has had greater influence: The Pretenders or The Monkees?

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is on its way to being that which casual music fans will treat as the definitive word on the history of rock and roll. And because of that, it's certainly reasonable for the more knowledgable music fans to become concerned about who's being inducted and who's not. We might not be able to do anything about it, but we can still be pissed at the way rock history is being re-written.

Can we all agree that the Rock and Roll Museum is fast becoming a complete sham? The Hall of Fame Foundation in new York City is totally separate from the Cleveland-based "living museum." In fact, the Foundation is in the same building as Rolling Stone magazine (and yeah, Jann Wenner -- the owner and publisher of Rolling Stone -- is involved heavily with the Foundation). I wonder if they collude?

The Nominating Committee basically has a mandate to place as many Warner-Elektra-Atlantic (WEA, the Warner conglomerate) artists in the Hall, for the purposes of selling records and pushing their artists, pure and simple. This is why we see artists like the J. Geils Band and Percy Sledge on the list of possible inductees not to mention people like Wenner and Seymore Stein of Sire Records being inducted as well (Sire is another part of the WEA family). Bidness is bidness.

Basically, as I see it, the sole purpose of the Hall of fame is for music industry bigwigs (most of them involved with the Warner-
Elektra-Atlantic record companies or Rolling Stone Magazine) to get together once a year for a large party where they charge
something like $1,000 for a seat at a table at the induction
ceremony that only other industry bigwigs can afford and they
watch performances by living legends/whoever's still alive (and
whoever is willing to perform a few songs live) and they get VH1
to pay for the whole thing so they have broadcast rights.

The rest of the year, the Foundation is supposed to disperse the money they have to artists in need of financial help, but a mere fraction of the money actually was spent on the artists, the majority of the money went straight into the Foundation's pockets... millions. Sounds like the hall does pretty well for itself.

Rant off.