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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.

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.