Rock Hall: How about a little bit of ladies first?

My research assistant, Maude Bascome-Duong, and I finally had some time to crunch the numbers on the Rock & Roll Hall Hall of Fame nominations for 2022 and the results are mixed. While I applaud the nominating committee for putting Dolly Parton, the Eurythmics, Dionne Warwick, Kate Bush, Carly Simon and Pat Benatar on the ballot, numbers wise, the selection field still skews predominantly male.

Dionne Warwick

More than a third of the acts have female members, and all of those six acts have their women front and center. Not bad! But when you look at the total number of potential inductees, women account for only 12.77% of the nominees. (This is the more important number, because every living inductee gets a vote.) Yes this is higher than the current percentage of women already inducted into the Hall of Fame, but we need an infusion of women to be inducted to get their total percentage into the double digits. As I’ve argued before, this can only happen if the Hall of Fame inducts more female groups. We need the six women of Fanny to be inducted to begin to balance out the four men of Rage Against the Machine. The nominating committee seems to have a particular allergy to all female acts: Once again there are none on this year’s ballot. Fear of a female planet?

The other most egregious omission is any female rapper. The fact that Eminem has been nominated before Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Roxanne Shante is shameful.

The nominees are also more than 80% white. I repeat: The fact that Eminem has been nominated before Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Roxanne Shante is shameful.

Here are four acts that better be on next year’s ballot or I’m calling for a Lysistrata: Salt-N-Pepa, TLC, Labelle, and Fanny. Also for goddess’s sake, induct Big Mama Thorton as an early influencer this year. In Janet Jackson’s immortal words: Induct more women.

The man who taught me the art of the lede

On February 5 the man who first taught me to be a journalist passed. There is no greater testimony to the profound impact Raymond Schoenfield had on me than the fact I became a journalist, and then a journalism teacher. Schoeny, as his students at Beloit Memorial High School knew him, had the number one quality to be a good instructor: love of subject. In class, in the offices of the student newspaper The Increscent after school, in passing in the hall, Schoeny would always ask your opinion of the latest news, or pull you aside to recommend a good book. I went on to get a BA at Brown and a Master’s in Journalism at USC, but no one taught me more than this pale, tall, high school professor with the big glasses and thinning combover. He and social studies teacher Lloyd Page treated us teenagers as intellectual equals and guided us to be critical thinkers. Schoeny made the Increscent offices a sanctuary for nerds and misfits. I was the editor in chief my senior year, and my bestie Cindy Hahn – not a nerd, but still one of us — was my girl Friday. There was a whole wonderful cast of characters there. It was a haven not just for writers, but for photographers, cartoonists, designers, sales people, etc. We would skip pep rallies and hang out with Schoeny. He was our Gandalf, a benevolent father figure with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. But he was also very serious about teaching the importance of good journalism, and the Increscent had the awards to show for it. He taught me to think deeply about literature and writing. I wrote a paper comparing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata under his direction, which is a pretty crazy thing to do in a public high school in a small Midwestern town, and his high praise made me want to be a critic.

I last saw Schoeny when I was inducted into the Beloit Memorial Hall of Fame, which I think he had not a little to do with. He lost his eyesight in his later years, which seemed like the cruelest twist of fate: this voracious reader, blinded. His wife Joyce was always by his side, and he was proud of his kids. If you want to do something about the future of journalism, join me in donating to the scholarship fund in his name. https://statelinecf.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/create?funit_id=1223