2024 Rock & Roll HOF screechfest

A fevered Foreigner debate is what keeps me coming back.

 

Sleeps in a Tupperware container. If you watched “Erie, Indiana” you know what I mean.

 

Someone has to be the arbiter of good here. That's why they have a group that votes on these things -- they are the arbiters of good. It's art -- you can't go by stats.

Again, you are arguing in favor of honoring a band that you acknowledge wasn't very good.

 

Yeah, you're equating "not very good" with "terrible." I'm equating it with what it actually says with English words, as in "not very good" is somewhere south of "very good." Not terrible. Once upon a time I thought Foreigner was the best band there was. Period. They were my favorite band for five years. Now I think less of them. They're not very good. Not the best. Not great. Not awesome. But still pretty fuckin' good. (Their music, not their current assemblage, which, as BYH noted, is a cartoon). And you sure as shit can go by stats. A band that has sold more than 80 million albums probably qualifies for something. Apply that anywhere you want. I don't like a single Mariah Carey song (doesn't make them bad) but can easily look at her stats and see she belongs in the HOF. You've denounced Foreigner's entire genre, which was for nearly a decade the most popular music in the world, because you don't like it. It has nothing to do with how good it is. You don't like it, so you shit on it. Simple as that.

 

Foreigner's got high FIP but low WAR.

And the BABiP on this one is .372.

 

Bit of a strawman example here. I mean, I actively drink Schlitz and Grain Belt Premium, but won't eat Papa John's unless there's no other option? Where I live now? I'll never eat Papa John's again. Most of us are populists and snobs all rolled into one. It's just a matter of which categories you happen to choose for both.

No one is black-and-white in the way you're describing it. As you might guess, I don't care for beer snobs. My friends have a group that travels around monthly to brew pubs. I participate when I can, but I'm not in the group, because I could give a fuck about the latest snozzberry IPA. I don't want a flight of beer of shit I don't like. I Go for the Gusto.

I am almost certainly a music snob by the definition of many. But in other forms of entertainment, I'm a weirdo. For films, I do enjoy the Criterion Collection elite movies, but I also enjoy a cheapo exploitation flick so long as it's somewhat original.

What I don't like is pure product, conceived from jump as something designed to sell tickets at the lowest common denominator or hop on a trend. I despise super-hero movies for that reason, even though I know intellectually that there's probably some decent "art" that filters through the "product", but I can't get past the notion that they're creating art to line their pockets. When I see it, I recoil at it, because I distrust the art from jump because of why it was created. It isn't organic.

And yeah, there's a lot of bands who fall into that product category. It's a moving target on when or how it was "product". It's also a moving target on how susceptible the individual might be to "product". Most people don't want to admit they are artistically juiced by "product". That doesn't change the fact that it wasn't "product" at the time it was put out.

When I was younger, I was very susceptible to "product". Power Station, for example, was product from jump. Let's combine Duran Duran, Chic drums and a MTV-ready lead singer. It wasn't supposed to be Robert Palmer, it was supposed to be a rotating group of lead singers, but it turned out fine. At 14? I thought it was the absolute shit. At not-14? I know quite a bit of it basically was shit (especially lyrically), but I also hold on to aspects what I did like. The drums on that album are almighty, for example.

But I can get out of my own head to understand it was product, but still enjoy it as a guilty pleasure. Nothing wrong with that ... but I also don't go so far as to suggest Power Station should be in the RRHOF. I also liked Quiet Riot when I was 13. I'm not about to go on a spiel about how great Quiet Riot was because they weren't. Nostalgia can be a bitch goddess. She can lead us to idiotic hills to die on.

Whatever their artistic merit, Foreigner definitely began as "product". So did Boston. So did the Runaways. KISS was even worse than product, they were exploitation from jump with the make-up. None of their music would be "product" as today's tastes would define it, though, so what are you left with? It was product of a time and place. And even product can be influential, for good or bad.

Thing is, though, is that bands do rise above their origins. I would say Foreigner grew as a band. Most of the Foreigner 4 era stuff is light years ahead of garbage like "Dirty White Boy" or "Feels Like The First Time". Maligned by some, I think "I Want To Know What Love Is" is a great song. Hell, even Lou Gramm's "Midnight Blue" is a pretty great song. In other words, like nearly every other band, they had peaks and valleys. They may have began as product, but got a bit better than that.

The Runaways began a pure product exploitation ... hey check it out! Chicks that rock! And some of their stuff isn't as "great" as retrospective reviews would suggest, especially early stuff, which sounds like it was produced in a tunnel, but time allowed them to rise above being product to being influential. Their hook as Chicks That Rock turned out to rock chicks over the long haul and they are appreciated for it.

Even KISS has its merits if you separate out the ingredients. Ace Frehley is a legitimately good guitar player. Some of their product can be enjoyed on a certain level. "Shout It Out Loud" if you want to hear it through a certain prism, is a great power pop song packaged as hard rock. A lot of their stuff is, honestly.

However, where I'm in the PC camp, is that popularity is not the same thing as artistic merit. No fucking way. Never, ever.

McDonald's is super popular, but you foist a McDonald's burger in front of me vs. a backyard burger I made or custom-made at a restaurant, the fucking McDonald's burger ain't winning that Pepsi Challenge. There's nothing wrong with having a McDonald's burger, I have 'em on occasion, but it's a bit ridiculous to argue that just because it's popular means it pulls even with something that is qualitatively better.

If popularity was the only measure, let's put the Tiffany and the Wiggles in the RRHOF. They sold like hot cakes at their peak. The Wiggles might still sell for all I know. Give the people what they want!

We also know that plenty of things that were "popular" in a moment are fleeting in the long run. One of the biggest concert draws of the early 70s was Grand Funk Railroad. Being younger than that generation, I couldn't name more than three or four Grand Funk songs at all. Their popularity had no permanence. Had basically zero influence. So what was it, really?

Which gets us to the crux of the matter ... who does the gatekeeping? Who decides the quality? Jann Wenner did the gatekeeping forever. After obvious choices, his gatekeeping got very ridiculous. There is not a planet I want to die on where solo Stevie Nicks is a RRHOFer. Sorry.

Problem is, we live in a time where any gatekeeper is viewed with suspicion to outright hostility. It's why the public hates the media. One of the core definitions of our job is to gatekeep what is and what isn't news.

And, to my much, much, much, much, much shorter post ahead of this, quality is in the eye of the beholder, so without a strict rule on what constitutes "quality", having a gatekeeper cannot be done for an artistic enterprise. You could go the sports route and have a voting panel, but whether it's 40 people or 4,000, you're still going to have bitching about those who go to bat for their pet artist.

Ah well. I'll just crack open a Schlitz, eat my locally-made pizza, and see how it all shakes out.

 

Guess you're not a music maker, or dreamer of dreams?

 

@The Big Ragu says maybe trim it back a little bit.

 

Funny you mentioned some of those. In my interview with Gramm he said most of their singles were not the songs they'd have released as singles, but the record company picked all that stuff. He said he'd like to play some of them in his solo shows but fans want to hear the hits. I said, "You'd be surprised," then rattled off 3-4 titles that he seemed genuinely surprised I knew.

But I'm not sure you're right about Foreigner or Boston being "product." At least not entirely. Scholz was writing those Boston songs years before corporate rock became a thing, and Foreigner rolled out in 1977, which was maybe a little before that era really got rolling. I would call Loverboy (my ultimate guilty pleasure), Asia, Survivor, Billy Squier (!), mid-80s Yes, 1981-86 Journey and the entire hairband era more of what you're saying. Bands like Foreigner, Boston and even the Cars and Blondie were at the outset of the era. Lots of others followed their lead, for better or worse. All those bands, while maybe not using it to the full extent in their songwriting, oozed musical talent and applied it to the trends of the day.

 

Only 1,185.

 

Big Ragu can fuck off.

This ain't my first SJ rodeo and it sure as shit ain't my first long-ass post. Deal or don't.

 

Foreigner and Boston were both marketed as "stadium rock". A term you don't hear much these days, but it was the "product" of the time because the idea was to market bands that could sell out stadiums. Their equivalents are Heart, Eddie Money to a point, and a bunch of forgotten pre-MTV bands that didn't slip through beyond a hit or two. You could probably include Aerosmith too, but they had a record contract before "stadium rock" was a defined thing, though their popularity is a part of the same period. The record labels very often funded these bands and hand-picked producers/songwriters for them so they could assure themselves of album sales. At least that was the theory.

I mean, *every* band, short of super-groups with established artists, have some sort of organic start, but it's a matter of whether they were allowed/forced to be molded into something by record companies or were allowed to follow their muse, so to speak. As it comes to Foreigner? I have no idea what their origins were or whether they intended to make straightforward rock from jump.

The Cars are different because they were definitely defined as new wave or power pop when they debuted. Blondie started as a CBGB NYC band. They are on a different spectrum - bands that started with something fresh that eventually morphed into product. The Blondie of "Heart Of Glass" is light years removed from the Blondie of "Dreaming", for example, even if there weren't many years in the evolution.

A later band that had an arc sorta like Foreigner is Stone Temple Pilots. Originally a metal band, when tastes changed, STP was conveniently packaged as "grunge" by their record company purely for CD sales. It was cynical and it made me distrust STP for a few years, but they got better as they went along before they imploded.