The Great Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Swindle!

I’ve got
a new col up at The Daily Beast, about the latest inductees
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here’s the start:

If you’ve got anything going on in your
life—Christmas shopping, binge-watchingGeraldo at Large, a
slight burning sensation during urination—you probably missed this
week’s announcement about the latest crop of inductees
into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. No one blames you,
America. The pyramid-shaped museum has been
inducting—entombing might be a better word—honorees
since 1986, and its annual press release stirs about as much
excitement these days as a deep track from Emerson, Lake &
Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery.

This year’s honorees feature the usual oldies-show
cavalcade of the clinically dead (Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, the
Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein) and the career dead (Nirvana
bassist Krist Novoselic, Linda Ronstadt, whose Parkinson’s disease
has forced her retirement); guys who used to wear flower pots on
their heads (Peter Gabriel) and guys who used to dress up in makeup
and platform boots (Kiss); a
hippie-peacenik-turned-radical-Islamist (Cat Stevens, who converted
to Islam and publicly supported the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
death sentence against Satanic Verses author
Salman Rushdie); and Hall & Oates.

I’ve got two main objections about the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, one more ideological and one more philosophical. And lest
anyone think these the natterings of a rock-hating jazzbo or
classical music snob, let me state for the long-playing record that
I am second only to Joan Jett in my unconditional love of rock and
roll. In fact, I suspect that I contracted a yet-to-be identified
strain of hepatitis from obsessively reading the 1977 Kiss Marvel
comic that was actually printed in the band’s own blood.

Read the whole thing.