Boys don’t cry in this fun house

By • Oct 9th, 2007 • Category: Columns

Another year, another column about The Stooges and The Cure not being nominated for the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. It’s a shame that this has become an annual occurrence.

One has to question whether the Hall now is leaving the pair off the list of nominees because it’s become an even bigger deal that the two bands haven’t been elected than if they would be. Yet it’s ignorant to think that the election committee at the Cleveland museum would manufacture press by intentionally harming its credibility and ignore two monumentally influential acts. It’s just beginning to feel like a child with a guilty conscience who nervously refuses to look his mother in the eyes out of fear of getting caught, that if the Hall ignores its mistakes long enough, people will just forget.

Not voting the groups in only means that those people selecting don’t think that The Stooges and The Cure are Hall of Fame material. But voting them in years late is a sign of second-guessing, it admits guilt and owns up to the mistake of leaving them off the ballot for so many years. Deny. Deny. Deny. It’s the key to any lie. Even if nobody else believes the committee’s story that the two bands don’t belong in the Hall, as long as it never changes its tune the public can’t cry hypocrite.

With any Hall of Fame, the concept of “first ballot” honors seems pointless. In baseball, the writers hold athletes to an even higher standard to vote them in during their first years of eligibility. The reason that it makes no sense is because a player’s stats can’t change from year No. 1 to year No. 2 post-retirement, so why they are worthy of being elected one year instead of another is cause for confusion.

A hall of fame athlete is a hall of fame athlete the moment he or she retires; the same way they are the same Hall of Fame athletes the moment that they become Hall-qualified, and the way that they are the same Hall of Fame athletes two years, three years, whatever years after eligibility. Making players wait for election is nothing more than a power move by pretentious baseball writers looking to add a level of elitism to an already elite group of performers. A player can do nothing to harm or help on-the-field accomplishments once his or her playing days are over.

That certainly is not the case for musicians, as every subsequent year of a performer’s career works toward or against Hall of Fame status. Which is why there is such a long window before an act can be nominated – 25 after an act’s debut or after a figure has become part of the industry.

Madonna and The Beastie Boys headline this year’s list of household names, which was announced last week. The five top vote-getters from the class of ’08 will be inducted during a March 10, 2008, ceremony New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Although there is nothing wrong with these – as well as other nominees, such as Leonard Cohen and The Ventures – the glaring oversight of The Stooges and The Cure remains a slight to two historic and undeniably influential acts.

By its current requirements, The Stooges have been snubbed since 1994 and its iconic front man Iggy Pop has been eligible for induction as a solo artist since 2002. The Cure has been denied since 2004.

Though neither band has had record-breaking chart figures – The Cure has had only a measly four different albums crack the million-sales marks, and only once sold out the 80,000-seat Wembly Arena – the two group’s influence on contemporary culture and music is unavoidable. And that is more crucial to an act’s induction than anything else. The Hall says so itself in its criteria, which considers “the influence and significance of the artist’s contribution to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll.”

Certainly this wording will need to be changed as the era of early hip-hop artists, such as Run-D.M.C., approaches selection. But the specifics of the words “rock and roll,” are less important in the Hall’s description than “influence and significance.” It’s these time-enhance standards that make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s standards different from those of baseball’s – a performer actually can become more Hall-worthy after eligibility.

Today’s music environment would be nothing like it is without the influence of The Stooges and The Cure. In fact, neither would yesterday’s music environment, nor that of two and three decades ago. David Bowie’s induction in 1996 would not have been possible without his partner in glam, Iggy Pop. And in two decades, when the performers of today become eligible and remembered for launching a couple of the biggest revival movements in memory – the garage rock, new wave movements of the 2000s – historians will invoke the names of The Cure and The Stooges as the godfathers of those sounds.

No two Hall-eligible acts have had as much direct influence on today’s radio, fashion and pop culture than these two. Open to any magazine page, turn to any FM frequency or flip to any channel and there will be a band trying to looks or sound like either The Cure or The Stooges – sometimes at the same time. Which makes their continual dismissal by the Hall’s committee members all the more baffling, as they surely are bombarded daily with reminders of the two band’s greatness.

What sets these two acts apart from the other legendary acts still waiting for the call from Cleveland – Roxy Music, T. Rex, to name a few – is that the bands have front men that transcend their music and have, somehow, become even more iconic than their already great catalogs. And while Bryan Ferry and Marc Bolan headed the aforementioned acts to classic songs and hipster praise, neither has worked into mainstream culture the way that Pop and Robert Smith have. To a degree, it could be argued that the two figureheads are bigger than their respective bands, and that just their presence is the biggest asset to their musical outfits.

Pop’s appearances in more than 20 films, including “The Crow: City of Angels” and “Coffee and Cigarettes” have made his wiry build and leathered face recognizable to people who have never listened to “Fun House” or “Raw Power.” He’s so familiar, in fact, that when Peter Jackson was looking for a muscle-to-bone reference point for Golem in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, he drew from images of Pop. His image has become so etched into all our minds, that footage of his 1977 performance at the Machesters Apollo only is topped by the classic photo of him bent backward and contorted on stage – the same photo that filmmaker Richard Linklater chose to kick off a character’s rock’n'roll family tree during “School of Rock.” Much the same, Smith has been linked to everything from people wrongfully assuming Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands” was drafted from his image, to “South Park” claiming that “‘Disintegration’ is the best album ever.” Although it’s not, the show’s writers weren’t far off.

This sort of cross-commercial appeal, coupled with more than 60 years of combined rock’n'roll experience and heart-wrenching, mind-opening songs is what makes Pop and Smith – and The Stooges and The Cure, respectfully – the biggest oversight from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It might be excusable for the Academy for so long to continually have voted against Martin Scorsese films, convincing itself that in a given year maybe, somehow, “Dances With Wolves” was better than “Goodfellas.” Or it’s possible for The Cubs to always run into a buzzsaw of an oponent, such as The Padres or Marlins, in the playoffs and lose. But the rock Hall ignoring three decades of consistancy is an insult to Pop and Smith’s bodies of work, it turns a deaf ear to the significance of their entire careers.

And it’s a mistake that somebody should rectify. Maybe next year.

Northwest Herald, Oct. 9, 2007

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