It’s a venerable tradition around here to have an annual thread complaining about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so let’s just elect our own!
The one complaint everyone seems to agree with is that there are way too many members, around 400 at last count, or about ten per year that they’ve been open. We will be more selective by electing only THREE inductees per year the Hall has been open, for a total of 120.
Here’s how I propose to do it: The ballot below lists all the inaugural members of the Hall, from 1986. Vote for the three candidates you feel most deserving, according to whatever criteria make sense to you. Our top three vote getters will be inducted. Next Friday-ish, I will post a ballot with all the inductees from 1987, PLUS any of this week’s candidates who didn’t finish in the top three, but did clear 15% of the vote. Then we will repeat for all 40 years. You can also nominate acts who aren’t in the real-life Hall by PMing me, but only once we reach the year the act would have been eligible, 25 years after their first recording. (Circle the date: if the schedule holds according to plan, Jethro Tull will be eligible on April 17, just in time) I’m going to make this a PUBLIC poll for now, but am open to feedback about this or any other rule.
Note: This might be a time to consider strategic voting. I think the objectively correct choices here are clearly Elvis, Chuck Berry, and James Brown. However, next week’s candidates are, no disrespect, all the old-timers who didn’t make the first class. So there are IMO many candidates on this ballot who would be strong contenders on next week’s ballot; if you have a favorite outside the big three, it might be wise to vote for them to keep them eligible for next week. The week after that the classic-era rock groups start becoming eligible, so the competition will become a lot stiffer.
The other hoary old complaint is that too many inducted artists are only tangentially rock and roll. Are we going to avoid that one? Fine if so, but it is bound to come up so I dunno if you want ground rules covering it.
No, not at all. I suspect this group is going to lean heavily toward groups which fit a definition of “rock” which hasn’t evolved since 1970, but every actual Hall inductee will appear on our ballots and the voters will have their say.
I just received an ineligible write-in vote, so allow me to clarify:
What we are currently voting on is the ballot from 1986. Therefore, the only artists currently eligible to be nominated as write-ins are those whose first commercial recording was released in or before 1961. For next week’s ballot, the first one which may actually have write-in candidates, the cutoff will be 1962, and so on.
Chuck Berry and Elvis are shoe-ins but it kills me that I had to choose between Buddy Holly and Fats Domino. Fats was playing R&R before anybody else on that list, but Holly’s songs were better.
CHANGE OF RULES: I realized it will be easier for all concerned if people just nominate write-in candidates in this thread, so everyone can see who has been nominated. I will keep track and add them to the ballot in the appropriate year.
Our first write-in candidate is Weird Al Yankovic, nominated by HeyHomie. He will be eligible in 2008.
Buddy Holly: 2.5 million albums sold, 1 #1 hit, enormously influential, Rolling Stone’s 15th greatest artist of all time.
James Brown: 200 million albums sold, 17 #1 hits, enormously influential, Rolling Stone’s 7th greatest artist of all time.
Holly might deserve to go in on next week’s ballot, but I don’t see how you can justify voting for him over Brown, other than by using an extreme purist definition of “rock and roll” which will disqualify 90% of the Hall’s inductees.
Should sales alone qualify though?
Also Brown is the Godfather of what music genre?
But I voted Little Richard anyway, his influence on Rock and Roll was greater than Brown’s or Holly’s and you only gave us 3 votes and Elvis and Berry were must votes. I’m not sure how people didn’t vote for that pair.
Little Richard is a personal favorite, but I don’t think you could really say he was more influential than Holly. Holly is credited with originating the “2 guitars, bass and drum” lineup, which is about as influential as you can get.
And if you’re going to say that Soul and R&B don’t count as “rock”, we’re going to end up with no Black artists except Berry and Hendrix, and in a few weeks people are going to be arguing that Ian Anderson tweetling on his flute is “rock” and my head may explode.
Brown is Rock & Soul and belongs, just not as the first 3 to me.
I actually prefer Brown to Elvis & Little Richard for that matter.
I’m realizing I’m not really up to arguing Richard’s case over Holly, but I felt like Holly gets too much credit and Richard was actually more influential. We’re also talking 18 months for Holly and 70 years for Little Richard.
In the end, very tough to pick between all 3 of them and I would like to vote for Ray Charles but his music overall doesn’t seem to qualify for the first class of the Rock & Roll HoF. Also despite personal shortcomings, Jerry Lee Lewis may have done the most to bring Rock & Roll to White Teens in the 50s.
I think rock (or rock and roll, or whatever we’re calling the style of music we’re hall-of-faming here) has very fuzzy boundaries. I wouldn’t disqualify anyone unless they were clearly all the way outside that fuzzy boundary, but I would weight them more heavily the closer they, and the music they influenced, are to the unquestioned interior.
They’re both extremely influential which is why they were both nominated on the very first ballot . This is sort of the structural problem here. Since rock and roll was birthed in the 1950’s and came of age in the 1960’s, the hall had 35 years of history to work with when it opened. Including all of those important formative years. That’s was an embarrassment of riches to choose from and it’s going to be front-loaded. So a winnowing list like this one is going to drop a lot of early heavy-hitters who are arguably more important than those who came later.
So yes, someone like Little Richard is going to be excluded and someone like noted “heavy metal band” Jethro Tull will make it in. And I like Jethro Tull . It’s why I haven’t voted, really - I can’t vote to exclude Ray Charles (probably my favorite artist of that class), but I also don’t think I can list him top three in terms of influence on that list. Maybe not top 5. But he is still more important that many who came after. So for now I’m abstaining.
The problem is the “unquestioned interior” is defined by old white guys. The classification of some songs between rock, soul, funk, or rap seems to depend on the color of the performer.
I prefer just ignoring the argument altogether and forgetting about if I personally think something is rock or not.
Chuck Berry was the first person I thought of, and the only one I felt I had absolutely no choice but to vote for.
But Elvis was the “King of Rock and Roll,” so he was almost as much of a shoo-in. He’s not “so great” as at least some of the others, but it’s also about importance, influence, and, well, fame. It is, after all, called the “Hall of Fame” rather than the “Hall of Greatness.”
You read that sentence as “Elvis isn’t great”, when the operative words are actually “I don’t see” and “so”.
So was Chuck Berry. Also its Father.
And Little Richard was The Architect of Rock and Roll, and Ray Charles was just The Genius, and James Brown was The Godfather of Soul, and without Buddy Holly there would be no Beatles as we know them.
Nowadays Elvis is more famous as an easily-imitated fat man in a jumpsuit i.e. the caricature is more famous than the reality, IMO.
I’m not arguing he doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame at all. I’m just saying if you’re forcing me to only pick 3, he’s not going to be on my list of 3.
. This is sort of the structural problem here. Since rock and roll was birthed in the 1950’s and came of age in the 1960’s, the hall had 35 years of history to work with when it opened. Including all of those important formative years. That’s was an embarrassment of riches to choose from and it’s going to be front-loaded. So a winnowing list like this one is going to drop a lot of early heavy-hitters who are arguably more important than those who came later.
. It’s why I haven’t voted, really - I can’t vote to exclude Ray Charles (probably my favorite artist of that class), but I also don’t think I can list him top three in terms of influence on that list. Maybe not top 5. But he is still more important that many who came after. So for now I’m abstaining.