Not too many people take the current one seriously and the bias of the people who select these bands is pretty extreme.
So if you were given the task of building a Hall of Fame from scratch, what would be some objective criteria? Obviously there’s going to be disagreements about bands at the margins, but it seems to me that some accomplishments deserve automatic induction, in much the same way that getting 3000 hits is pretty much automatic induction for a position player in baseball.
If you’ve sold 100 million units, you’re in unless there’s a compelling reason not to have you in, such as if the bulk of those sales are just one big album and the rest of your career has little artistic or commercial merit.
If you’ve had 10 top ten hits, you’re in.
If tons of other successful acts consider you a big influence, you’re in.
If you have ever been recognized by most fans of your subgenre as the undisputed king or queen of that genre, you’re in. So long as the subgenre has commercial significance. So the best pop punk band would make it, but the best power metal band probably wouldn’t.
If you’ve had a #1 album in three different decades or a top 20 album in five different decades, you’re in.
And this is criteria for bands who should never get in:
Acts whose commercial success lasted less than five years and they ceased to do any work at all afterwards. Death is not an excuse!
Acts who were strictly a product of their time and who wouldn’t sell dick if they put out an album today. Truly great bands can at least generate enough interest to get their album decently high on the Billboard 200. Some bands are so great that releases of unreleased material or a new greatest hits album can shoot straight to the top 10. Some bands had albums so amazing that they keep on resurfacing on the Billboard 200 decades after they debuted(which would count for purposes of this requirement). But I don’t care how important you might have been in 1967, if your music isn’t timeless you stay in 1967, you don’t get to be in the HOF.
Any act who did well only because the production team around them was HOF-quality, such as pop acts whose songs are written by HOF-quality writers, whose albums are played on by HOF-quality session musicians, and whose live shows and videos are done by HOF-quality choreographers. Instead, induct the people who actually made it happen, not the good looking sock puppet or puppets who presented the product.
So the backbone of the Hall would be the bands who met those criteria, and then you could populate it further with other acts of merit who justify it. Anyone have any other ideas?
My change is that the bands or performers so inducted actually have to be rock bands and performers. Sorry, Madonna, Run DMC, NWA, Donna Summer, Johnny Cash - your contributions to music and American culture are great, and should be acknowledged, but find your own hall of fame.
What’s the defining criteria, you ask? If you have to ask, “are these guys rock and roll”, they are out. If it ain’t obvious, they are out.
Maybe I’m too strict - if it were up to me, I’d leave out more than half the people in there. But there are too many non-rock acts in there.
I appreciate the intent, but don’t see how this is any better. Just for the “5 years or less of having a career” criteria, what about Buddy Holly or Eddie Cochran or The Sex Pistols?
That’s problematic, since “rock or not” isn’t Boolean. Consider the Beatles, for instance: Are they a rock band? Some of what they did was rock, and some wasn’t. Rock is a description of the work, not of the performers.
Those acts could be considered for being so influential, but there are some acts in the HOF, like the Mamas and Papas and Lovin Spoonful who had short careers and weren’t pioneers or anything.
Weird Al should be in.
While he doesn’t have the numbers, he is considered important by other performers:
Being parodied by him is a badge of honor.
Other performers have requested or have been happy to perform on the parody of their song.
Despite perception, over half of his output is original material, both music and lyrics.
His musical abilities, and those of his band, are held in high regard by other musicians.
He’s had a longer career than many of the performers he’s parodied.
He’s so dominated his genre that there is no other.
I dunno. I think you’d lose a lot of the Motown acts with this one. Most of the sounds you here there are the same Motown session guys - who were certainly tops in their profession - building the song around the singers.
I don’t like the RRHoF, but I like the proposed one even less. Sales is a terrible measure of the importance of an act, and removing people who wouldn’t sell records today is both unprovable and without merit as a measure of their importance.
Thanks for letting me know that it could be worse. I’ll try to bitch less about the existing one.
100 million sales is wildly unrealistic unless you made a typo and meant 10 million. Even the best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, sold at best 65 million copies.
First of all, it’s impossible to come up with a definition of rock that includes all the acts you want to get in, but excludes the ones you don’t. And “you” being anyone making a list.
Second, rock has evolved. Important innovators seem old fashioned, but second- and third-generation bands know how important they are (even if the listeners don’t).
Sales are no guarantee of quality, nor is the length of a career. The Beatles were only making records for six years, yet any rock hall that leaves them out is a joke. The Doors also had a short career, as did greats like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Yardbirds, Cream, and many others.
There really isn’t any way to create a rock Hall of Fame that will please everybody. Rock long ago split into many subgenres, and people who love one subgenre invariably hate many others.
Clash fans hate Yes, Yes fans hate Chic, Chic fans hate Black Sabbath, Sabbath fans hate the Monkees, and so on. ALL Of those acts are, arguably, Hall-worthy, but who do we trust to make the right choices? The freaking critics?
I didn’t take into account cumulative sales over an artist’s career and beyond. The Beatles, Elvis, and Michael Jackson have all sold over 100 million in the years since their respective debuts. But I still wouldn’t use 100 million as a base, since that takes decades to achieve those kinds of sales. And would you put Taylor Swift in the Hall of Fame? I wouldn’t. She’s sold 149 million units, but she’s only been recording for about 10 years. I’d keep the current 25 year requirement.
According to this rock historian / collectibles dealer who claims to have documentation he got from Nico, the total sales of The Velvet Underground and Nico after two years of sales was about 58,000 copies.
Fascinating. But they still deserve to be up there in whatever Hall of Fame-ish rankings that are considered. As Brian Eno said, the VU may not have sold many copies, but everyone who bought one started a band.
I like all of those to one extent or another. So obviously I should be the sole and final arbiter, but it is possible I’d literally let everyone in :D.
I like several of them myself, but still wouldn’t consider myself objective or impartial.
Look, EVERYBODY would agree on Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, and a few other acts. But by the late Sixties, rock had veered off into many different directions, and fans of some genres HATED others. As it is, there are surprisingly few metal acts and almost no prog-rock bands in the Hall, mainly because the Hall reflects the tastes of Jann Wenner and the critics.
It’s tough to convince any voter that a band he HATED still deserved to be in the Hall of Fame.
Many if not most successful bands are successful because:
The front person is good looking.
They have good dance choreography.
They have good connections.
They have good business sense, particularly in figuring out how to stay relevant and interesting.
So basically, when you consider it, success is a very poor proxy for musical aptitude. For every successful band (who may or may not actually play any instrument, and may or may not actually write their own music), there are probably a hundred bands around the world who are actually creating and performing their own music and which music is on par with the quality of the most popular songs, but who will never become popular due to lacking all or most of the above attributes.
I’d vote that the concept is ultimately dead on arrival, simply because music is less important to most people than the social experience of music (dancing, gossip about the band members, buying posters of hot performers, and forming cliques around certain styles of music). And if that’s what you want to give an award for, you’d really do better to give it to the production company than to the band, in most cases.