OK, Madonna I get. the rest of them? Please.

The 2007 class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was announced last week, and it was as disappointing as one would expect given the options. When the nominees were announced in September, I prognosticated the results.

I was three for five, correctly forecasting Madonna, the Dave Clark Five and Leonard Cohen. My misses are puzzling. How could the Beastie Boys not make it, or Afrika Bambaataa, while a second oldies act like the Ventures did? I would imagine the Beasties, to their credit, are seen as too young to make it, perhaps, but Bambaataa should have appealed to voters' sense of inclusion and diversity. Instead, they went for the popular-in-their-time but artistically less significant Ventures, who trod similar ground -- albeit in less pioneering fashion -- as Duane Eddy, who is already in the hall.

That leaves John Mellencamp. He's clearly a commercial success, and at times he was a critical success as well. American Fool, Uh-huh and Scarecrow were as good as any three albums made by a male solo artist in the early '80s, save for his closest musical forefather, Bruce Springsteen, whose The River, Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. are hard to top. But people aren't inducted into the hall of fame for a handful of really good albums -- at least, they shouldn't be. They should be inducted for long, continually challenging and creative careers, or for short bursts that are simply so revolutionary that they can't be denied. Mellencamp has enjoyed a long career, but it would be hard to argue that it has been anything more than a commercially popular artist for much of it.

As I wrote in September, it's going to be a long, dry period until the 2020s when the first commercially successful grunge and rock acts become eligible. Maybe the hall will take that time to deal with some glaring omissions and ignore the artistically bankrupt pap that will become eligible in the interim. Yeah, right.

Labels: criticism, music