My Dad brought up the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concert to me over the weekend, completely unapologetic in his fondness for the proceedings. “You know me,” he said, “I don’t know anything about today’s music, so I like it when those old guys get together and do those old classics.”We laughed at how my Mom thought the audience was yelling “Boo!” when Lou Reed came out on stage.
I praised how Iggy and the Stooges are now in the HOF while questioning why Abba should even be allowed it.
I told my Dad about Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
You read that right.
It was my Dad who asked about him. “Who was that guitarist playing with Springsteen?”
“Tom Morello. He’s in Rage Against The Machine.”
“Man, he is good!” my Dad admired. “I don’t know any of his stuff. Is it worth anything? What is ‘Rage Against The Machine’ like?”
“They’re this lefty revolutionary heavy rock band. They’re pretty full of themselves.” I explained.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” I continued, “I don’t know what to think of a band that encourages everyone to ‘rage’ against corporations while signing a contract with Sony, one of the planet’s biggest corporations.”
I went on to explain my whole thing about Abba and the Hall, which I’ll revisit now.
I’ve got no quarrel with Abba, in fact, I kind of like them. Oh sure, I was a kid when they were making hits in the late 70’s and I had an opinion about them then too. You see, I was a big “disco sucks” kid, which was really just a way to align myself with some of the older, rocker kids in the neighborhood. I didn’t have anything against disco, but it took a few years to admit that.
Fast forward to Abba Gold. The radio station got a copy of it and since we didn’t play Abba anyway, I got to take the disc home.
Feeling a bit nostalgic, I put the disc in and pressed play. For over an hour, I was able to recite song lyrics that I hadn’t heard in well over a decade. Song titles that I didn’t recognize sudden became familiar the moment I heard the song. Even in hatred, Abba had successfully planted their music into my head where they took up permanent residence. You have to admire a band that can do that.
But the thing I discovered about Abba was within their arrangements. They sounded unique and I’ve yet to find another band that is comparable to the way in which their songs were arranged.
It’s because they seldom used traditional R&B arrangements in their records, one of the primary ingredients of rock and roll. Listen closely and you’ll hear similarities with European classical music but very little in terms of the two basic ingredients of modern-era pop hits: R&B and C&W.
As a result, Abba belongs nowhere in the halls of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame because they don’t fulfill a basic necessity of that honor: rock.
It looks like Iggy is finally on the way in, even though it’s a bunch of shit that they’ll make it after Ashton died.
Kiss is stirring up interest, but before they even touch that band, the Hall needs Alice Cooper in.
And as always, not even a peep about Rush.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concert? It may have pleased my Dad to no end, but for me it looked like a bunch of phoned in performances by a few artists who haven’t tried hard in quite a while. It was a spectacle of entitlement, a set list by people who looked like half the milestone was getting signatures on the performance contracts.
Someone needs to tell Billy Joel to shut the fuck up. For real, the dude hasn’t written a new tune in years (and that classical shit doesn’t count either, dude. You and I both know that’s only your ego talking, that the dude who started in a silly hard rock duo called Attila has no place tinkling the ivories on classic gas), hasn’t written a decent album since Glass Houses (sorry, The Nylon Curtain sounds like it was written by overdramatic college freshman who probably got his ass beat by a few rubbernecks from Allentown) and who’s penned three of the worst songs ever written in the past 50 years (“We Didn’t Start The Fire,” “Leave A Tender Moment Alone,” and “All About Soul”).
Fuck you, Billy Joel. Nice one on letting your (then) old lady paint your album cover. Did you look at that thing before you sent it off to the art department at Columbia?
Anyways, the Hall of Fame is a joke, the concert sucked, and Billy Joel’s a douchebag.
