Rock Hall Announces Unimpressive Nominees for Class of 2024

Let’s get real about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees and who gets inducted.

The Rock Hall just announced its nominees for induction in 2024, when the fall induction event will take place in Cleveland. They’re doing us no favors. It’s the weakest list of nominees possibly ever, with only a handful of deserving choices, and a few dozen more worthy acts once again omitted. Some staggeringly influential acts have never even been nominated, although the nonexistent, producer-created disco band Chic has racked up 11 nominations (never inducted, hopefully never will be.)

Let’s get one thing straight. We’re not joining the familiar social media howls of ‘That’s not rock & roll,” insisting that any act that doesn’t feature white boys playing guitars somehow falls outside the genre they’ve defined so narrowly it’s virtually lifeless. There are plenty of acts in rock-adjacent genres — even acts featuring Black people — whose influence is undeniable and who deserve it.

But it’s never been more obvious that it’s not about influence and never really has been, once they got through the agreed-upon pioneers.

Let’s look at the acts that the white boys online think should be the picks: Foreigner, Peter Frampton and possibly Ozzy and Jane’s Addiction. All the others provoke hand-wringing outrage. Those four acts are all based on white men playing guitar. I’ll grant you Jane’s Addiction is a highly original and influential band. Ozzy is borderline; it was really his band Black Sabbath that influenced virtually everything you hear today and it took them too damn long to get in, although they finally did.

But the pedestrian Foreigner, a play-by-numbers top 40 rock band? And Frampton? Another nice artist who sang and played guitar well, but his influence was largely restricted to encouraging other bands to make epic live albums, hoping to repeat the breakout success of Frampton Comes Alive. But if Frampton’s success led to the Michael Stanley Band’s Stagepass, his influence wasn’t all bad.

As for the rest of the list, it’s mostly filler. Once again, the nominating committee, probably mostly white men, is getting pangs of guilt about the lack of women in the Rock Hall. But instead of admitting that women were excluded from being full participants in the music business for decades (perhaps because some members of the nominating committee were doing some of that excluding —god knows former member Jann Wenner was) and hence had no chance to become influential, it’s been studding the nominee list with marginal or irrelevant performers for years. I probably could stretch to make a case for Mary J. Blige, who was one of the pioneers of hip-hop soul. But I can’t find any reason to induct Mariah Carey or Cher.

Sinead O’Connor’s nomination highlights another bad tendency of the Rock Hall nominating committee: the pity choice for someone who just died. Surely she was a valid choice last year instead of the obscure inductee Kate Bush. But she was alive! (Speaking of which, you’d think with the revived interest in Luke Combs’ hit cover of her song “Fast Car,” Tracy Chapman might have been a better choice than, say, Mariah Carey. And she’d check two boxes: woman and Black. No, wait – three. She’s also gay.) As for pity choices, it’s clear this list was finalized before February 2. That was the day the MC5’s Wayne Kramer passed away. If they’d known that, they surely would’ve re-nominated the MC5, who deserved induction many, many years ago.

The other choices — Sade, Eric B. and Rakim, Oasis, Lenny Kravitz, Kool and the Gang, the Dave Matthews Bands, and especially A Tribe Called Quest, a key member of the Native Tongues movement in hip hop — all at least have some minor claim to importance and influence. But none of them was of major importance compared, say, to Soundgarden or Jane’s Addiction, whose sonic innovations helped underpin most of 90s grunge, or Joy Division and Bauhaus, whose music launched much of ’80s post-punk.

We could go on and on. Instead of mining more recent music for slivers of influence (and lots of record sales, which seems to be a driving factor), the Rock Hall needs to go back into the history of the music and ask, “Who really laid down the groundwork that others built on?” It wasn’t hard for us to create a list of more deserving nominees that almost anyone nominated this year. (I could name 200 more deserving than Foreigner. Who next? Europe? Loverboy? Mr. Mister?)

Finally, when is Patsy Cline going to get in as an early influence? Frankly, they should not induct anyone else until they induct her.

Here’s the start of an alternative list:

Alice in Chains

B-52s

Bauhaus

Black Flag

Connie Francis

Cyndi Lauper

Dead Boys

Devo

Fugazi

Hawkwind

Husker Du

Ian Hunter

Iron Maiden

Joy Division

King Crimson

Living Colour

MC5

Motorhead

New York Dolls

Pere Ubu

Sonic Youth

Soundgarden

Suzi Quatro

The Pixies

The Replacements

The Smiths (no, I don’t want to hear Morrissey’s annoying speech either, but they were undeniable influential.)

Warren Zevon

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