The Rock and Roll Hall’s class of 2022 has something for almost everyone, a columnist writes… except, maybe, people who like rock bands.
Consider it a sign of the times, maybe: In the list of seven artists that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s select industry voters elected into the institution for the class of 2022, there is not a single rock band. That can be taken as a major signifier that the pendulum among the music intelligentsia really has swung all the way from what was coined some years back as “rockism” — the belief that rock ‘n’ roll is inherently superior to other forms of popular music — to the other side of the scale: poptimism. The MC5? No go, again, this year, despite this being the band’s sixth nomination, the first having come back in 2003. Rage Against the Machine? Unsuccessful in the band’s fourth time in the ballot in just six years. The New York Dolls? Striking out in their third time officially at bat; the group’s first nomination came back in 2001. Devo, too, is now a three-time loser, as of this year’s voting. In on their very first appearance on the ballot? Lionel Richie and Carly Simon, to whom (and this is no value judgment upon them) never a single head has been banged. That’s not to say there will be no rockers getting their gold when the induction ceremony happens in Los Angeles Nov.5. Judas Priest will be entering the Rock Hall that night, but not because the band was voted in by the hall’s 1,000-plus industry voters. They’re coming in the side door; when the Hall’s overseers saw that Maiden did not make the cut, apparently, they made a move to go around the voters and install them via a “musical excellence” category, the same thing they did when LL Cool J failed to prevail last year Some may see this as sneaky, but it’s easier to view it as smart thinking. Metal fans have long felt the genre, or subgenre, was subject to bias among Hall voters, with only Metallica, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple having previously gotten in under that umbrella. Putting Priest in by any means necessary puts off the chances of any official or unofficial boycott of the museum in Cleveland by frustrated metalheads. And there is one figure primarily associated with rock as a form of music who got properly voted in this year, Pat Benatar — a welcome sight for those who’ve long argued that the pioneering women of rock need to be individually as well as collectively given their due. But to find the last and only time that no actual rock band was ushered in by the Hall’s duly appointed general votership, you’d have to go back to 1999… a year that was not exactly underserved with rock, as Bruce Springsteen got in that year (sans the E Street Band) and so did Paul McCartney (after previously getting in with the Beatles, of course).
