Uncovering the Next Generation's Hall of Fame
The Inside Scoop on the 2020 Rock Hall Ballot
Alan Light was asked about nominating Notorious B.I.G. without first getting in five time nominee LL Cool J:
"I believe very much in going back and standing on the ones that you think are important and sometimes it takes putting somebody to ballot, especially if they're in a more specialized genre, a bunch of times, to say, 'no, we really believe this one is important, we're not just going to dump them.' But I'm still fighting to get more hip hop in, and when there's a win to take, I will take it. And I think that Biggie has a good shot and we can come back to LL Cool J next year if there's not somebody else. I want to take the wins where I find them.”
Alan Light on the struggle to get R&B artists inducted:
"I'm happy to come back and fight for Chaka and Rufus again. The post-1970 soul is still a very difficult, you know it's a tough sell within the voters, because there's that sense of maybe it's softer, it's more female. Those are still a challenge. And that's why it was so exciting to get Janet [Jackson] in last year and say, okay, maybe now we're at a place where that generation of R&B singers can get looked at within this framework.”
On the potential to redefine the Rock Hall’s Early Influence category, which is currently supposed to honor artists who “pre-date the birth of rock & roll”:
Light: "We've said this before, there's also some of these who at a certain point should you look at them as Early Influences? Should Kraftwerk be not in the general ballot, but moved to go in a different way because of everything in that whole universe tracing back to this one band. That's another thing that we would look at.”Peresman:"Absolutely. As we get older and move on, when you think about Early Influences it's not the 50s and 60s anymore. The Early Influence can be 70s and 80s depending on the certain genre of music.”
Alan Light told the following story about the 2018 inductions, but perhaps had Sister Rosetta Tharpe (nominated as a Performer, but inducted as an Early Influence) confused with Nina Simone (nominated and inducted as a Performer):
Light: "Two years ago we put Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the ballot really to force the hand of the Early Influencers committee to say, this is somebody that needs to be in. I had zero expectation that she would be voted in, and would be one of the biggest vote getters of that year. And who the hell knows sometimes.”Majewski: "Wait, she wasn't voted in, she was an Early Influence.”
Light: "No, she was voted in. She went in from the ballot. Yes, absolutely.”
Mejewski: "Joel's making a face.”
Peresman: "I'm not sure.”
Light: "No, no, because that was the whole thing. She was voted in and I never anticipated that would happen.”
After that they went to commercial but never corrected the mistake.
Why is the Nominating Committee “forcing the hand” of the Early Influence committee to induct certain artists? Why isn’t this simply planned out in advance of putting out the ballot? The Early Influence committee isn’t some separate entity, it’s essentially a subset of the Nominating Committee. This really makes no sense and is a bizarre and haphazard way to run an induction process.
Alan Light was asked why Pat Benatar was finally nominated after being eligible for 20 years:
”I think it's a different reassessment of that era. What you see here is there is a lot of 80s into 90s that are on [the ballot] now. I think we're moving out of the 'greatest generation' classic rock 60s and 70s. I feel like the Zombies going in last year was the last piece of the British invasion to go in from that. It's more reassessing, who's been out there if we're going to go back, if there's not a lot of brand new first time eligible [artists], if that's not going to fill a lot of the space, who have we missed or who should we be thinking about again?”
Light was asked why it sometimes takes an artist dying for them to get the Rock Hall’s attention:
”That's always a challenge. On the one hand you want to honor people while they're around to be honored. And on the other hand, sometimes when they pass, there's this different appreciation and this different visibility and you think about them in a different way. And part of you feels bad like, well, maybe we should have done it before when they were here, but at the same time maybe you need that distance and that context to really understand what their contribution was.”
Alan Light on which factors he considers for nominees:
”To me this always comes down to this balance, the levers your pulling and pushing between excellence, influence, and popularity. Those are the three things you want to consider.”Light was asked if voters get weary of seeing the same names on the ballot each year:
”Our responsibility is to put together the best, strongest ballot that we can put together. That's what this represents. Now what happens from here, what the voters do with it, and then when that peels off into -- are there other ways, like we did ended up doing with Nile Rodgers, and putting him in the Musical Excellence category, otherwise you don't want the ballot to be the same names over and over again each year and holding those spots and blocking other people from getting their shot. We've got to think through when enough is enough.”
Alan Light on the impact of the “Voice Your Choice” voting kiosk at the Rock Hall Museum:
”I know that Greg Harris, who runs the Museum side of things, always brings in the top [artists], you can vote in the Hall of Fame on a touch screen for who you would want to see in, and he makes a point of presenting all that information into the nominating meeting.”
One of Alan Light’s artists he pushed for this year was Whitney Houston. Light was asked to make the case for her:
”Let me start with: Whitney Houston is the biggest selling artist who is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She is also the most awarded artist, Grammys and beyond, who is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And there's an entire generation of vocalists who say, 'that's the gold standard, that's the voice that we all aspire to.' So when I go back to excellence, influence, and popularity, there's no argument on any of those things for her.”
Light’s first argument for Houston is about record sales (he also cited seven consecutive number one albums to support Dave Matthews Band’s nomination), which is a direct contradiction of the Rock Hall’s previously stated criteria that “Gold records, number one hits, and million sellers are not appropriate standards for evaluation.” Apparently that’s not the case anymore in the populist era of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Update: Alan Light also went in depth about the Rock Hall on his own SiriusXM show, Debatable, where Greg Harris appeared again. Here are some additional highlights:
Harris said that the Nominating Committee were able to put a lot of artists on the ballot who have waited a long time because there wasn’t “a large body of artists who were first time eligibles.” There are at least six obvious Hall of Famers who became eligible this year, but it sounds like those artists are in for a long wait.
Before the Rock Hall backtracked and changed the nominated members of Motörhead, Harris was asked what the process was for choosing which members to induct:
”Some of our researchers, some historians have worked on this. There have been a number of passes at it. The idea is to identify those core band members that were there for the creation of the most iconic music of the band’s era. To give you an example, if a band made their best records in the first 10 years, their most impactful, influential records, but they continued touring for another 30, the touring musicians, later musicians, are not a part of it. Now you have a band like the Doobie Brothers who had two distinct eras and while a number of band members remained the same, of course you’re going to put Michael McDonald in with the band because that was another chapter, another sound, another iteration, as opposed to different band members playing the same stuff.”
Since the Rock Hall has to change the listed members after they release them almost every ballot, perhaps they need to rethink that process because there are many errors (here is a list of them) made over the years that aren’t so easily corrected.
Alan Light acknowledged there are definite flaws in the system:
”Is it an imperfect system? It is an imperfect system. I am the first one to say I have lots of ambivalent feelings about a Hall of Fame. But it’s an opportunity to tell a story about excellence in music and we keep sorting out and refining and working out along the way what that means.”
Alan Light was asked if the thought a Nine Inch Nails song appearing in a Black Mirror episode this year was a factor in getting them back on the ballot:
”I would say, in some ways yes. I think in some ways “Old Town Road” and everybody figuring out it’s a Nine Inch Nails sample while the band is out touring. I think between looking at the biggest song of the year having this element from a Nine Inch Nails song. The Black Mirror episode being based on a revision of a Nine Inch Nails song. These kinds of context do change over time. You do gain an appreciation for somebody’s influence or longevity.”
Light was asked why T. Rex finally was nominated:
”Sometimes looking at all the UK acts that went in last year, then looking to what the influences were on them. Looking at the way T. Rex was responsible for so much for laying the groundwork for glam rock. Def Leppard going in, and Joe Elliott flying the flag as a massive T. Rex fan, you pick up on all those things. Of course you do.”Light talked about the impact of the Fan Vote:
”Voters do look at [the fan poll results]. The rest of us [on the Voting Committee] who get one vote will look at that and say ‘oh there’s somebody that a lot of fans are really getting behind.’ That can absolutely make a difference for putting somebody on your own final ballot.”
Light was asked about Early Influences:
”Sinatra is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Is that a forerunner, is that an early influence on rock and roll? Some argue it is, some argue isn’t. That hasn’t been resolved to being in there. There’s always more work to be done. I think also those early influencers that continues to move up in time too. In some ways I feel like you should be looking at Kraftwerk as an early influence as the formative band for electronic music. That may be a more appropriate way to honor them and the right way to put them in rather than on a list of performers where it’s going to be really hard for them to break through just because not enough people, not enough musicians, know who they are. So I don’t think there’s a hard and fast year zero where it starts.”
Alan Light also named his biggest snub:
”I have more frustration for the Sidemen category, more than the big Performers category, I think there are more that are missing. Always the one that I stand and scream for is Carol Kaye, the bass player from the Wrecking Crew who played on every one of the Phil Spector records, all of the Beach Boys records, everything that came out. She’s not in. Hal Blaine the drummer is in. That to me is a bigger oversight than one of my favorite bands isn’t on this ballot that I would like to see get in someday. So, that’s a different process, those are different voters. I mean it’s not a voting thing, it’s a committee thing. Those are always being reviewed and revisited as well.”
The Sidemen category was replaced with the Award for Musical Excellence in 2010, so presumably that would be the way Carol Kaye would be inducted now.
A caller asked Light if hip hop and pop artists were being nominated, why not more country artists too?
”I think it’s a totally legitimate question. I know that some of the people from the Board of the institution get mad at me if I talk about conversations that went on within the nominating room, so I want to be careful. I need to be careful because the understanding is that those are there in confidence. But I should say Willie [Nelson] is somebody that gets discussed and talked about and I think there’s an interesting case to be made. You know Johnny Cash is in. Now Johnny Cash was on Sun Records and was a rockabilly early on, and you can make a little more direct connection. Country obviously is a different tradition, it’s a different history, it’s a different place. But you know some of those names -- Patsy Cline has come up. Some of those figures have come up. There may be a year where everybody looks at it and goes, you know what, that makes sense and we should do that. All of these things are continually being evaluated and I think it is a totally legitimate thing to say if you’re talking about rock and roll as a spirit and attitude that some of those outlaw guys absolutely carry that. Which side of that line goes in and which does not is a shifting thing, but it’s a fair question.”
About the three women on the ballot, Light said, “I’d love to continue to see more women get nominated and continue to see more get in.”
Light was asked if Whitney Houston can get nominated, why not Garth Brooks?
”It’s a legitimate question. We may not be quite there yet, but we could get to a day where somebody could look at it and say that. Similar times, similar scale [as Whitney].”