Rock Hall’s 2024 Hits, and Misses

They should be inducting Sinéad. It’s bad enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame voters did not choose the nominated global groundbreaker and instead elected, gulp, Foreigner. (And Peter Frampton. And the Dave Matthews Band. And …) The committee that selects the musical excellence and influence awards could have made an end run around the voting body’s systemic sexism to give Sinéad O’Connor an award for excellence, as they are doing for Jimmy Buffett and the MC5. Clearly the hall chose those acts now because Buffett and Wayne Kramer of the MC5 died in the past year. Those were good, honorable choices. But they make the omission of the iconic and historic Irish singer and songwriter in this year when her death rocked so many fans’ worlds even more fucked up. O’Connor’s music and activism changed people’s lives, and will continue to do so for decades if not centuries. Without dissing other choices, O’Connor should have been the slam-dunk pick of 2024. Actually she should have been the slam dunk pick for the last 13 years, since she has been eligible. To not induct Sinéad says a lot about the hall’s endemic female trouble. This year’s class will bring the overall percentage of female inductees to a whopping 8.83, incremental progress since I first started keeping track in 2019.

Sinéad was a revolutionary. The Rock Hall is a conservative institution.

That major caveat aside, I am overall impressed with the class of 2024 – especially some of the interesting and smart choices of the board, especially especially Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Dionne Warwick. These pioneers have been too long passed over by the hall, and the fact that they are both being inducted this year gives me hope that the Cleveland institution is serious in its efforts to diversify. Same for the induction of Suzanne de Passe, the multitalented executive who is being given the Ahmet Ertegun Award (unfortunately named for a rock hall founder with a reputation for shitty behavior towards women).

While they are still dragging their hooves when it comes to gender, the hall has reversed its decline in people of color: this year’s class is 53 percent BIPOC. Still, the omission of Eric B & Rakim strikes me as the biggest disappointment after Sinéad. At least A Tribe Called Quest and Mary J. Blige are in; they had my vote. The hall is playing a delicate balancing act, trying to please fans of classic rock, hip-hop, country, blues, pop, disco, funk, etc. But why do the women always get the short end of the stick? The percentage of women in this year’s class hits double digits, barely: 11.63. Interestingly, there are no white women in the class of 2024. They remain the most underrepresented group in terms of male/female and BIPOC/white: 3.88 percent of total inductees.

Sorry, Sinéad.

(Thanks to my research assistants Athena Cheris and Tyler Roland for help with this year’s number crunching and visualizations.)

Forum on the future of journalism today!

Bodies of Water

As some of you may know, I’m a water baby. I swim in the ocean regularly (like Sza!), kayak, body surf, etc. Water is my element, where I feel most like myself. 

I’ve decided to start writing more about the environment, with a new column called Bodies of Water for Random Lengths News. As I write in today’s debut, “I’m interested in exploring the human relationship to water through profiles of individuals who have compelling and diverse connections to it. We must explore our relationship to bodies of water in order to save them, and ourselves. ” 

RLN is an alt-media survivor, covering the Los Angeles harbor area for more than 40 years. What better place to dive into the most compelling issue of our times: the health of our planet. 

Check out my first column — in which I travel to New Orleans for the Ocean Sciences Meeting — at the link here.

Fear of a Female Planet

What is the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame afraid of?

The 2024 nominations for popular music’s most famous, and infamous, hall were announced this morning. There are some excellent choices: Cher, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, A Tribe Called Quest, Sade, Eric B. & Rakim, Kool & the Gang, and most of all Sinéad O’Connor. And there are some appalling choices, which I won’t be churlish enough to name here, but I’m guessing you can guess.

My team and I are still counting and calculating, but the racial diversity looks good: 10 of 15 acts have at least one person of color; that’s 66.6 percent. Good. Five have at least one woman: 33.3 percent. Not bad. In terms of individual nominees – which means people who, if inducted, get to vote and have this on their resume for the rest of their lives and in their obituary – there are five women, 47 men. Females account for 9.62 percent of the nominees.

That’s a shade better than the 8 percent figure that the total number of inductees has hovered around since I began counting the individuals in 2019. But it’s still pretty shady.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is afraid of girl power. I said it in 2019, and it’s still evident: They are terrified of women banding together. They repeatedly ignore all-female, or mostly female bands, never nominating, let alone inducting, Labelle, Fanny, TLC, Destiny’s Child, Bikini Kill, Salt-N-Pepa, the Shangri-Las (RIP Mary Weiss), Hole, L7, etc. Yet they love them a collection of mediocre male classic rockers. Okay, I’ll say it: I’m looking at you Foreigner. (Full disclosure: I was a young teen when Double Vision came out and “Hot Blooded” was my jam, but I have moved on.)

It’s a classic technique: Divide and conquer. Honor the individuals, not the collective. It’s also very much a male-gaze thing: It’s easy to objectify a woman alone on stage, much scarier to see a group of women enjoying each other’s support and egging each other on. Jann Wenner may be gone, but the Rock Hall is still led by men, the nominating committee is majority male, and they are still following the same old tired Master narrative.

Once again, no Willie Mae Thornton? After Lynnee Denise’s book and Doja Cat’s song?! And no hailing Queen Latifah?! Rock Hall, do better.

Here’s the complete list of nominees:

Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Cher, Dave Matthews Band, Eric B. & Rakim, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Jane’s Addiction, Kool & the Gang, Lenny Kravitz, Oasis, Sinéad O’Connor, Ozzy Osbourne, Sade and A Tribe Called Quest

This post has been corrected from an earlier version.

Talking Joan Didion With Rabbi Sol Solomon

Tune in tomorrow, Saturday Jan. 27, to hear me in conversation with the good Rabbi Sol Solomon on the Dave’s Gone By podcast. I bet you will laugh!

Remember? Mary Weiss

The song starts with an echoing minor key piano chord. Then three women in subdued voices with strong Long Island accents have a conversation over the sound of melancholy humming. 

“Is she really going out with him?”

“I don’t know. There she is, let’s ask her.”

Thus begins the melodramatic story of Jimmy and Betty in “Leader of the Pack,” one of the most famous songs of the 1960s. In a high-pitched wail over a backdrop of heavily reverbed drums, Mary Weiss tells the tragic tale of her doomed love affair with a biker, complete with racing engine and screeching brakes sound effects. Forget girl group odes to soldier boys; the Shangri-Las sang the praises of the bad boy. 

Loving bad boys made the Shangri-Las bad girls. They dressed the part: tight pants, black leather boots, heavy eye makeup. The Shangri-Las featured not one but two pairs of sisters: Mary and Betty Weiss and twins Marge and Mary Ann Ganser. They met at Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, New York. They were white working class women who grew up singing in church. Their tough girl look reflected their urban street roots. At a time when the Beatles were still wearing mod matching suits, girl groups such as the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes were rebelling against respectable fashion, lifestyle, and politics. 

“Leader” and “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” the Shangri-Las’ other iconic smash hit, offer over the top productions by the infamous Shadow Morton. These are not showcases of great singing or profound lyrics. They are more like miniature B movies, glorious in their unrepentant cheese and teenage angst. Bands like the Shangri-Las made young women everywhere feel like this was something they could do: sing straight from their hearts with a group of their literal or symbolic sisters. RIP Mary Weiss.

Stick a fork in it

The news that Pitchfork is being swallowed by GQ dealt a body blow to many of us for multiple reasons. My heart goes out to those able journalists now looking for work in a market increasingly flooded with workers from other recent layoffs, such as those at Bandcamp. The shrinking of platforms for professional critical discourse and news about music is alarming for artists and labels as well as those who work for websites. For me, the most sickening aspect is the fact a music publication has been consumed by a men’s journal. This has been a huge part of the problem of music journalism for decades; it’s one of the reasons Rolling Stone has always covered women so little and poorly – in the ‘90s when I freelanced for Stone, we were always told that it was a men’s magazine; Wenner Media sibling publication Us was for women. P4k started off being a rather typical nerdy indie boy blog, but it rose above those snarky beginnings to become a platform for diverse types of music and writers. I loved the way it reckoned with its own past by reevaluating its reviews. The fact that a female POC, Puja Patel, has lost her admirable run as editor in chief is a stab in the guts – that the knife was wielded by another woman, Anna Wintour, sickening. (For the record, I never wrote for Pitchfork and never felt a part of its community, but still I grieve.)

That said, I discussed the news with the 14 undergraduate students in my music journalism class on Wednesday. Only two of them said they ever pay attention to Pitchfork, and all they really know about the site is its rating system – and they aren’t crazy about that. They see it as arrogant, judgmental. Instead this group of dedicated music lovers prefers to find out about new releases through Spotify, social media, and friends and family. (One student reads The New York Times, bless her heart.)

This is a small survey sampling, but it confirms what many of us know: Forget the death of newspapers and magazines (that’s old news about old news), we are now in the end of the era of websites and blogs. Young people crowd source their news, information, entertainment, and opinions. As one student said, she would rather figure out whether she is going to like an artist by reading a bunch of different people’s comments about them, rather than one person’s opinion. And of course, consumers don’t need critics to tell them what records to buy any more: they can hear them themselves on apps and YouTube.

This is all very disturbing for critics, journalists, and media companies, and it’s also bad news for artists – criminally underpaid by Spotify – and the music industry. The only comfort this offers to the talented people at Pitchfork is that they should realize it’s not that they weren’t doing good and important work. It’s just, well, the times, they are a changing. Again.