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.
Populism 