The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Should Not Exist

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2025-01-05 01:00:06

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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other. I assumed that I had turned to CNN and was watching its ebullient, occasionally shouty business and aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. I wasn’t even close: It was Roger Daltrey of the Who, and he was excitedly introducing the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton in a condensed version of the October ceremony.

Frampton’s music was, for a moment in the 1970s, the soundtrack to my misspent teenage nights; on the broadcast, Keith Urban joined him to perform his megahit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and I remembered every word. And Frampton seems like a man who is genuinely loved by his peers. It was a nice moment. But when 80-year-old Daltrey—who, at 21, famously sang, “Hope I die before I get old”—is introducing a man whose biggest hits were produced nearly 50 years ago, it’s a reminder that the entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concept is utterly wrongheaded.

As the saying goes, good writers borrow, and great writers steal. I was once a professor, however, and professors give attribution, so let me rely on John Strausbaugh, who wrote a wonderful 2001 jeremiad against Boomer music nostalgia, Rock ’Til You Drop, to explain why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shouldn’t exist: Because it’s “as true to the spirit of rock’n’roll as a Hard Rock Cafe—one in which there are way too many children and you can’t get a drink.”