Flynn: (Not So) Rock and Roll Hall of (15 Minutes of) Fame

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its nominees on Thursday. Several appear neither rock and roll nor famous.

Nina Simone sounds about as rock and roll as a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Why not induct Michael Jordan into the Pro Football Hall of Fame?

LL Cool J is cool. Ladies love him. And he is James. But he is not rock and roll.

Link Wray played a mean guitar in the genre’s early days. But he performed on two hits, one of which covered “Rawhide,” that charted nearly sixty years ago.

Instead of highlighting the greatness of rock music, the nominees telegraph its weakness. The genre’s big breadwinners are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, ages that coincide with the decades when rock dominated. Searching for inductees, the Cleveland-based museum must go much further back than its 25-year waiting period for rock acts to receive consideration because few groups since the early 1990s achieved any lasting fame.

This does not mean that no really great acts came out in that period. It means that rock ceased to occupy a central place in popular culture. MTV became a reality television network, Rolling Stone morphed into a celebrity magazine, and youth culture went from 8-tracks and Walkmans and jukeboxes to Xboxes and cell phones and Facebook.

A handful of nominees win induction, so, presumably, many of the headscratchers do not find themselves alongside The Beatles and Chuck Berry and The Who and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. The ones who ultimately make the hall find out in December and perform at the ceremonies next April.

The 19 nominees include some worthy honorees.

The J. Geils Band should win two inductions, the first as a party rock band a la The Faces and The Rolling Stones and the second as a New Wave ’80s act. The Cars, another Boston-based band, enjoyed 13 top-40 hits. What rock band even charts today? Dire Straits (big in ’85!) wrote the national anthem of MTV in “Money for Nothing.” The Zombies released the most underrated albums of the sixties, which predated the advent of spellcheck, in “Odessey and Oracle” before breaking up. Radiohead played as the biggest band during rock’s tiny era. The Moody Blues evolved from a British Invasion act to prog rock to synth pop, enjoying hits at every stop of its musical journey.

But the MC5? Rufus and Chaka Khan? The Meters?

Again, the body limits its prerequisites to rock and roll and fame. But it cannot adhere to its own standards because all of the big acts of the rock era already earned enshrinement. So, a mission creep sets in that nominates popular acts in other genres and anyone even tangentially involved in rock’s early days. Like MTV, Rolling Stone, and youth culture, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame runs from rock and roll.

The very existence of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame signals the death of the form it celebrates. Mummies and the bones of extinct creatures belong in museums. Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom does not.