“Rock and roll is here to stay, it will never die” claimed Danny And The Juniors nearly sixty years ago and at least as a form it is a self-evident truth. While an argument might be made that neither Kanye West nor Daft Punk, poster boys for 21st century artistry in pop music, have anything to do with the rock and roll, the truth is as long as the rules of youth music are being applied: the aggressive outsider attitude, the they can’t jail our music, the us against themism, the novelty, and originality, and momentum of rock applies to pop, pop is the same as rock.West and DP are rock and roll.
If it is great, if its attitude applies, it is rock.
Great but not good.
For rock to matter, it needs to find itself out from under the weight of its own self-importance, it needs to get out of the mausoleum: rock in a hall of fame is like Regina Spektor’s “All The rowboats and oil paintings trying to run away”, the music doesn’t want to be there, it wants toe scape the confines and it would be much better off forgotten than remembered for what it isn’t. You don’t need a priggish self-important Danny And The Juniors, you don’t need to be lectured, proselytized, explicated and debated for whatever it is that made rock and roll great to be great, it kills it deader than hip hop ever could. If rock was a lecture, it would be a lecture, if it was a polemic it wouldn’t need music to express itself, it would live without it. If it was a contest, instead of a lottery, it wouldn’t need a freedom of thought. It would be that other thing.
If you can get past the question of who should and shouldn’t be in the rock and roll hall of fame, or that, unlike say baseball who lives on it, rock doesn’t need its scores institutionalized, the hall of fame is a terrible idea on the face of it: it isn’t about the types of greatness it needs to be in order to exist there. Better to forget the rock and roll greats then to destroy them through montages of heck. I went to the rock and roll hall of fame annex in New York a couple of years and was aghast at how they turned rock and roll into a series of ticks and talisman: it was a middle aged white man PR sport. Herded from one room to another like sheep in an abattoir, it was all press here and watch this now, replicas of old clubs and used guitars under lock and keys.
Let’s forget the obvious (if you really want a rock and roll hall of fame, just wheel Chuck Berry out and point at him, it would be enough), it’s just the wrong form in the wrong way. If you want to make a point about rock, surely the only way to do it is by going from garage to garage, knocking on the door and asking if there are any kids playing music there. As It Is have more spirit of rock and roll in 2015 then Green Day has. Surely, whatever makes rock and roll rock and roll isn’t old music, but vitality, liveliness, pleasure, an every person enjoining that opens the floodgates to a world gone wild. When a 17 year old DJ sitting in his room with his Pro-Tools has a viral hit, he is glocking the spirit of rock and roll. The enter all, the welcome mat, that is rock and roll is insulted by the VIP tented world of the rock and roll hall of fame.
It has nothing to do with who is in the hall of fame but that anyone is in the hall of fame at all. Rock And Roll is teenage freedom, and, indeed, everybody freedom come to life. In the uptight post-WW2 US of the 1950s, the dodgy paradise postponed of the UKs 1960s, the Prague Spring in ’68, the USSR want their MTV that brought down the Soviet block of the 1980s, housing projects in the Bronx, crumbling dodgy LES streets, New Brunswick living rooms, Iranian kids risking their lives to play metal even as I write this… that’s where it lives. The repulsive rock and roll hall of fame is neither great music nor great rock and roll, even if the people playing it are great. Dylan once wrote: “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse an’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe” and that is who owns rock and roll. It is anti-elitist, and when, as it gets popular it becomes exclusive, it stops being rock and roll and becomes something else.
Jann Wenner and the rock and roll hall of fame know nothing of this. I went to an induction a couple of years ago and it had nothing to do with rock and roll: it was long winded, self important, bland and dead from the neck down. Shellshag have more rock and roll in their little finger.
Rock and roll will, in fact, never die, but don’t thank the Hall Of Fame. Thank your children and your children’s children, where as long as a lonely girl picks up her guitar in her bedroom, or a coupla of friends jam together in the garage, or a loft in Brooklyn, it will breath life into music. When seventy year old retirees plug in in their living room, that’s where the rock and roll hall of fame lives. It can’t be quantified or controlled. And it will never die.