What Does Rock & Roll Look Like?

THEJAM
In 1986, Canadian artist Michael Keirstead created the “The Jam Part I - A History” to illustrate “the musical influences that shaped the evolution of Rock music.” It’s a fantastic piece filled with Rock & Roll Hall of Famers from the 1950s through the 1970s. Here is who is on the poster (everyone is in the Rock Hall except those that are linked):
  • John Paul Jones
  • Jimmy Page
  • Robert Plant
  • John Bonham
  • Jimi Hendrix
  • Nick Mason
  • Rick Wright
  • David Gilmour
  • Roger Waters
  • Elvis Presley
  • Marc Bolan
  • Jim Croce
  • Chuck Berry
  • Little Richard
  • Buddy Holly
  • Jim Morrison
  • Kin Hensley
  • Pete Townshend
  • Keith Moon
  • Roger Daltrey
  • John Entwistle
  • Janis Joplin
  • Brian Jones
  • Mick Jagger
  • Ron Wood
  • Charlie Watts
  • Bill Wyman
  • Keith Richards
  • Jon Lennon
  • Yoko Ono
  • George Harrison
  • Ringo Starr
  • Paul McCartney
  • Alice Cooper
  • Grace Slick
  • Muddy Waters
  • Bill Haley
  • Johnny Winter
  • Don Everly

Keirstead followed up that work with “The Jam Part II - Long Live Rock & Roll” which continued the project showing the following decades of rock stars (with a slightly more Canadian bias).

jam2
Here are the people illustrated (this time Hall of Famers are linked - most are not in the Hall of Fame yet):

For many rock fans, this is what the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should represent (even if it happens to be almost entirely white). If the Rock Hall also saw it that way, they might even have a chance to induct most of those people. But that’s not the way the Hall of Fame wants to represent rock and roll. They choose a far more ambitious path -- to include many of the different branches that sprung from the roots of rock and roll, including disco, electronic music, pop, and most controversially, hip hop. That makes their task exponentially more difficult. It’s hard enough to properly honor and represent the most important artists of one genre, but to try to capture the essence of popular music from the past half-century becomes an impossible task. There will inevitably be important artists who get left behind which leaves fans of all genres eternally frustrated. The current format of inducting just five artists per year does a huge disservice to their mission “to celebrate the musicians who founded, changed and revolutionized rock & roll,” when their definition of rock and roll includes an ever-expanding number of artists and genres. The Rock Hall has created an intractable problem.

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