2024 Rock & Roll HOF screechfest

I can picture the scene.

 

Don't get it at all, critical and commercial favourites in their era, made some great albums and Waiting For Columbus is a great live album from an era loaded with them. How anyone could think Laura Nyro, Randy Newman and Carly Simon, to name a few, are more representative of what that place is supposed to honour than Little Feat (or Motorhead or Maiden) is beyond me.

 

FutureRockLegends.com, the preeminent RRHOF analysis site, has their throughts on this year's class. Takeaways:

-- It seems as if the voters will be allowed to select seven acts, up from five.
-- They seem to think Cher is a done deal and that her bringing up her exclusion from the hall on Kelly Clarkson's show was all part of a big setup.
-- Not a fan of Sinead O'Connor's nomination, calling it "explotative and gross," and says that the RRHOF should emulate the country music HOF rule that people cannot be nominated until one year has passed after their death.
-- Calls out the RRHOF for the clumsy way it announced the nominees -- complete with factual errors -- on a Saturday morning.

https://futurerocklegends.com/News/#unique-entry-id-424

Another take on the nominees here from someone who seems to think about the RRHOF a whole lot:

Oh, By the Way, Here Are Our Nominees: The 2024 Rock Hall Ballot

 

Honestly, I have have no idea whether that song is "good." I went to see Foreigner on the 4 tour in 1981 and had never even heard it. They broke into a fairly extended jam in the middle of it while this giant inflatable Juke Box came up from the ground (which allowed me to figure out what they were singing in the chorus). In those days, we just went to shows, whether we liked the bands or not. (This new guy named Billy Squier opened that night. PRANCE, MOTHERFUCKERS!) I saw some regrettable ones. That performance of that song got me hooked on Foreigner, more than any of the hits I already knew. That and "Long Long Way From Home" are about the only tunes of theirs I won't hit the skip button on now. I don't dislike most of them. Just heard them enough.

 

"I've just heard them enough" would be a great thread. So many excellent songs that have just been played absolutely to death. If I never hear "Sweet Home Alabama" again I'll be eternally grateful. Some of it is that I've heard songs like "Layla" and "Stairway to Heaven" so many times that I'm just pretty much done with them, and some of it is the absurdly limited corporate rock AOR and Classic Rock playlists. If they announce going into a commercial that they'll be playing Ten Years After, I know without any doubt that I'm about to hear "I'd Love to Change the World" again, and it pisses me off no end.

 

I definitely remember tagging along with friends who had an extra ticket for a show for an act I might not be familiar with. (In the days of $20 or less tickets that was definitely a doable option.) I saw Alabama that way and I was blown away by how good they were as well as some other stuff that was not so memorable. I do remember turning down a ticket to see Foreigner on a Friday night at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto because as a broke high schooler, I'd already spent my money on Rush tickets.

 

I love me some Randy Newman, have for decades. He's a fun live show, ironic and self deprecating. Thing is that he's a singer-songwriter with a broad streak of Broadway/Hollywood. He's not by any stretch a rock and roller. Nyro was a critic's darling, much loved by Clive Davis, wrote some great songs but her records didn't sell. Carly was much like Newman, singer-songwriter, made some solid pop-rock records.

Google up something like "Ten best live rock albums" and "Waiting for Columbus" will show up on a surprising number of lists, nearly as often as The Who "Live at Leeds". It's a functional Best of Little Feat record, and the Feat was virtually always better on stage than on studio albums.

 

Huge pet peeve here. Even on Deep Cuts or whatever it is on XM, they still play the same 37 songs. Songs that were good-sized hits have disappeared completely because performers had a bigger one from that album. Cheap Trick, for example, has more than five songs, but you'd never know it.

 

So just where does mass popularity come in?

Is it considered a plus in deciding what is great music? It might almost be considered a minus, since we obviously hold little regard for the common, "non-educated" listener.

Does a band have to ring up a lifetime of four-star reviews from the hoity-toity to be Hall-worthy?

 

Especially when the hoity-toity changed some of its ratings after the fact, once stuff was deemed cool. Nevermind, which to me is absolute godawful schlock, but the cool kids really dug it, got three stars initially. Then, poof, it one day suddenly got five without a single thing changing.

 

Kinda like a four star recruit who signs with a G5 is suddenly a three star once he's not in the recruiting list of one of the heavily subscribed school's recruiting service column, or a three star G5 who is suddenly a four star when they flip to a P5.

 

Very big pet peeve on my Spotify DJ, which generally is good, but goddamnit, you're going to make me dislike Jesus, Etc., which is a great song, because it seems to the be only Wilco song the DJ's AI pea brain can come up with. I get it, the algorithm knows my favorite artists, but give me a group of deep cuts from those artists from time to time.