Annual Rock & Roll Hall Nominee debate

Afrika Bambaataa is a no-brainer to be in. And not just because I spent a lot of my teenage years watching this video on USA's Night Flight:

Leonard Cohen is a no-brainer, too. Brilliant songwriter. Haunting as hell. And Canadian!

If you put Chic in, it's on the strength not so much on the band's music, but because Bernard Edwards, Nile Rodgers and Tony Thompson played on and produced so many other artists' works. Then again, a million bands ripped off Chic's sound, either for a song ("Another One Bites the Dust," Queen) or their whole sound (Duran Duran).

 

He needs the money?
Leonard Cohen is the guy in the English department, working on his doctorate for the 19th consecutive year, talking about his novel, who tells people he's a poet in the campus joint to score with coeds.
Actually, Astral Weeks, the album that made Van Morrison into Van Morrison, sounds not a thing like Leonard Cohen who, without Dylan having done his whole act in 1964-65, likely would have had very little of a career, and who, it should be said, never wrote a song as good as "Gloria" in his life. As for their relative merits as singers, well...

 

Man, this is my favorite annual SportsJournalists.com thread. So predictable, yet so entertaining.

 

Or By-tor and the Snow Dog

 

Ace's album was the closest to a KISS album. "New York Groove" is another great song off that record.

 

Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits are the type of singers that you can get intellectual cred off of by finding an artistic rationale for their utter unlistenability.

 

And it took a national tragedy for New York Groove to get the props it deserved. Strange that a ditty about disco-era hedonism became a song of healing.

 

Niles Rodgers produced some Duran Duran albums at some point.

And Niles and Chic gave us a superb guitar riff and the great R&B line ... "Le freak, so chic"

Why must disco be bashed? Donna Summer was good, too. Can't the Hall honor disco?

 

You're half right.

 

Sorry, Tom Waits blows vocally as well. It tooks the Ramones to make I Don't Wanna Grow Up listenable. Mull that one.

And Mira, point well taken. Honor disco. Honor Giorgio Morodor and Robert Stigwood, tho, if you wanna honor the era honestly.

 

Stigwood is genius.

I feel old. I remember learning disco line dancing in fifth grade. ;D