Rock&Roll Hall of Fame

[Stephen Swann]

All this discussion of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame reminded me of
this review that I wrote up for the Imaginitive Rock list, after my
own visit to the HoF about a year and a half ago.  It seems an
appropriate time to post it here...


> A VISIT TO THE SCHLOCK AND WHORE HALL OF FAME
>
> It was an experience.  The whole thing was like an escaped side-show
> from Disney World.  Clean, neat white halls; brushed stainless steel
> display cases; slender, androgynous plastic mannequins dressed up in the
> sweat stained leather and spandex of generations of rock and roll
> animals.  To put it bluntly, it sucked.  It was a wildly, wholly
> inappropriate, squeaky clean, preserved-under-glass tribute the
> unruly genre it purports to honor.
>
> The lower galleries were the best parts of it.  They feature video
> snippets (all much too brief) of a variety of performers - a wonderful
> array of talent and spectacle.  Classic albums and the equipment of
> famous performers, displayed showcase-style, with the video monitors
> overhead giving you a taste of what the live performances of the era
> were like.  My favorite was a Stooges clip, showing Iggy doing that
> aggressive slouch of his right over the edge of the stage, and falling
> into the crowd.  A downward pointing arrow is superimposed on the
> video, to direct your attention to the complete mayhem in the crowd
> there, and is dutifully captioned "Iggy Pop".  It made my day.  The
> whole RNR Hall of Fame should have been more like that.
>
> The real problem is that not enough space is devoted to that kind of
> of raw, funny, irreverent presentation.  Performers are treated like
> some kind of religious icons, instead of the unruly, sexy, hedonistic,
> piss-on-the-establishment, piss-on-everything-else-too kind of people
> we know and love.
>
> I'm not saying that rock and roll doesn't deserve its hall of fame.
> I'm also not saying that it should be located in a burned out brick
> building that stinks of urine and has the walls and ceiling painted
> black.  But somewhere, this current venture just took a wrong turn.
> When I saw the slender, effeminate mannequin of "Lemmy", which looked
> like David Bowie with paste-on sideburns (ALL the mannequins, male and
> female, look like Bowie), I had more than a vague urge to stick some
> chewing gum on its face to give it boils.
>
> The actual "Hall of Fame" is a dark, dead silent room with dozens of
> luminescant signatures on the walls.  It feels like a shrine, not like
> anything at all to do with rock-n-roll.  I suppose that fans of
> Hendrix and Lennon, and the other semi-mystical figures in the history
> of the genre might feel at home there, but I felt kind of silly.  It
> seemed that maybe I should be lighting a votive candle, or toking up
> and talking about how we are star dust, we are golden - when what I
> really wanted to do was scream "FOR GOD'S SAKE, TURN ON THE FUCKING
> MUSIC!!!"
>
> Steve
> swann at panix.com
>