Quick Thoughts on the 2024 Rock Hall Ballot

February 13, 2024 08:47 PM Filed in: 2024 Ceremony
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's class of 2024 ballot was released on Saturday, and like every nomination season, there are new things to celebrate and criticize. Here are a few thoughts:
  • You have to go back to 2014 to find the last ballot that had 10 brand new names on it. Roughly 62% of Hall of Famers in the past 20 years were inducted on their first nomination, so look for voters to gravitate to the artists they haven't seen on a ballot before.
  • The "Fans Ballot" is back for its 11th year, but this time there's an important change. Fans can vote for up to SEVEN names each day, which implies that's what the actual voters will be faced with as well. Up until this year, Voting Committee members have been forced to narrow their choices to a maximum of five names, even when the number of performers chosen grew to 6 or 7. It didn't make any sense before, so this is a vast improvement and one we've been arguing for.
  • There is only one repeat nominee from last year's ballot, A Tribe Called Quest. That hasn't happened since 2010, when The Stooges were the lone holdover from the previous year. The other four multi-nominated artists on this year's ballot each have only one other nomination, so even these artists still feel fresh and not like "ballot-filler."
  • Cher bringing up her exclusion from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame out of the blue on the Kelly Clarkson Show a few months ago sure feels like a big set up now (as discussed on the Rock In Retrospect podcast, and with our nominee prediction). This has probably been a done deal for a long time. We'll see how serious she was when she promised to "never change her mind" about accepting the honor.
  • Say what you want about the Hall of Fame worthiness of Foreigner and Peter Frampton, but there's really no excuse that artists of their stature had to wait over 20 years just to be nominated. Voters may ultimately turn them down, but if it weren't for the Rock Hall's broken nomination and induction system, they should have had this opportunity decades ago.
  • The Country Music Hall of Fame has a wise rule that you are ineligible to be nominated for at least a year after you die. The Rock Hall's nomination of Sinead O'Connor so soon after she passed away feels exploitative and gross. Their justification that an artist's true legacy can become clear with the tributes when they die is insulting and just indicts them as followers of culture instead of leaders. A Hall of Fame induction should be the triggering event for a public career reevaluation, not a death. (This also applies to Kool & the Gang, who have lost many original members since becoming eligible in 1995.)
  • Look, Lenny Kravitz has been a rock star for 35 years, but his Hall of Fame credentials are very thin. Zero albums or singles on Rolling Stone's top 500 lists and he's hasn't even been able to crack our readers' Snub List, which has over 130 deserving artists still waiting for the call. The 1990s was absolutely an incredible era for music, so it's hard to fathom why Lenny Kravitz won the nomination lottery other than his status as an industry darling.
  • Oasis, on the other hand, have everything you'd want in a Hall of Fame career, including the "f**k you" attitude of not wanting it at all.
  • Nominating Committee - try to listen to the people in your group who are nominating artists like Jane's Addiction, Sade, and Eric B. & Rakim, and minimize the input from industry executives who have other motives.
  • Alan Light talked on his podcast about how great it was to have "new blood" on the Nominating Committee this year. "The idea is not to freeze all of [the NomCom and Voting members] in one place, and have everything move around it, but continue to move with the changes and try to keep up with the world as time marches on." Light has now been on the Nominating Committee for 18 years.
  • In an interview with NPR, museum president Greg Harris touted the Hall of Fame's recent gains with inducting women and people of color. Evelyn McDonnell still finds their actions lacking given their well-documented track record.
  • Others have pointed out the clumsiness of this year's ballot announcement, so we won't rehash the whole thing here, but the Rock Hall needs to learn from other Halls of Fame about how to handle the basic principles of these things. They have never been good at announcements, but this was a new level of bad.
  • The Fan Vote ends April 26th. (But where can one find this information? It's nowhere to be found on the Rock Hall's website or social media. No, you just have to go to Lenny Kravitz's Instagram for the exclusive ballot details.)
  • ABC and Disney+ will be the Rock Hall's broadcast partners for the second year in a row. Turns out streaming the ceremony live and then airing it later on traditional broadcast TV gets it in front of a lot more people than locked down on HBO.
  • It's tough to say if the live stream on Disney+ is what suppressed ticket demand for the 2023 induction ceremony in Brooklyn, but tickets were available for well below face value. This year's ceremony will be in Cleveland, which always turns out big for these hometown events, so if ticket demand is soft again, the live stream may be the culprit. (If they induct Dave Matthews Band, they won't have a ticket problem.)
  • This is getting a bit ridiculous:
  • No country artists are on the performer ballot this year. We'll have to wait and see if any make it into the special categories, or if the Rock Hall has lost interest in the genre again (there's no shortage of qualified artists, that's for sure).

Inductees will be announced in late April. Follow us on Twitter for the latest news and developments. (And apologies to those of you who used to follow our tweets on this website. Elon broke the chronological feed for anyone not signed into a Twitter account.)
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