I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: I do not understand how the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame makes its decisions. From a purely administrative point of view, I don’t understand announcing a class of potential inductees, two months before announcing who will actually be inducted, about six months out from the actual ceremony. I’d get it if it were like an awards show, where you had to tune in to see who among the nominees was selected. But with the way the Hall of Fame unrolls things, it feels like they lose momentum on their own story. And then of course there’s the whole megillah around who the nominees are! Let’s just say, the Hall has historically had a very broad view on what counts as rock & roll. Well, we’re at the beginning of the cycle all over again, with the Hall having just announced their large nominee list, that’ll be whittled down by April. And the nominees are… mostly white men! Another job well done from the Hall. [insert eyeroll here]
The nominations for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025 have been announced, and it’s certainly an interesting and downright random mix, with eight of the shortlisted artists — arena-rockers Bad Company, Southern rock revivalists the Black Crowes, rock ‘n’ roll dance-craze king Chubby Checker, late blues-rock belter Joe Cocker, punk/new wave superstar Billy Idol, Latin pop/rock band Maná, Dirty South hip-hop pioneers OutKast, and jam band Phish — being first-time nominees.
Perhaps the most surprising inclusion among those first-timers is Checker — not only because he never was inducted before alongside his ‘50s and ‘60s peers (an artist can be nominated 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording, so the “Twist” singer has had plenty of chances), but because the Hall has noticeably moved on from those decades in recent years. Maná’s nomination is also a curveball, even though the Mexican group is one of the most successful and accoladed acts in Latin music history, given the Hall’s tendency to overlook “foreign” artists who don’t primarily sing in English.
Another surprise is that this year’s shortlist is noticeably light on women, despite seeming corrective attempts in the last few post-Jann Wenner years to diversify the Hall. The only female Class of 2025 nominees, among the list of 14 total artists, are Cyndi Lauper and Mariah Carey, who were respectively nominated and passed over in 2023 and 2024, and New Order’s Gillian Gilbert and the White Stripe’s Meg White. There are also only four artists of color on the list. The ballot is overall the Hall’s most rock-dominated in years, with only two nominees, OutKast and Carey, representing hip-hop and R&B — indicating that the Rock & Rock Hall of Fame powers-that-be have listened to rockist/purist fans’ complaints that the institution should take its name more literally.
…Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballots will be emailed to an international voting body of more than 1,200 artists, historians, and members of the music industry (this is the first time that the Hall will use digital ballots instead of mail-in voting), while fans can vote at vote.rockhall.com or in person at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland. The Class of 2025 inductees will be announced in late April, with the induction ceremony taking place in Los Angeles this fall.
After all my complaining, I appreciate the attempt at the end there to break down the Hall of Fame’s nominating & voting process. I mean, it only describes the what and doesn’t explain any part of the why of it all, but still. I wonder how the Hall (finally) adopting digital ballots will affect the landscape of this whole system, if at all. Will it lead to more voters participating? Will it lead to more inclusion among the nominees? Will Mariah Carey at last follow her lawyer into induction? The area where I’m truly stymied is genre. Should the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame be limited to rock & roll? One would think. But there has been so much genre-bending over the years, that it almost seems like a lifetime achievement recognition for any prominent musician. So how do you reset the course without snubbing non-rockers? I have no answers! Except to encourage artists who want in to the Hall, to study Cher’s public name-calling campaign from last year. The more she denounced them for not inviting her sooner, the more it seemed they couldn’t get enough of her!