Search and Destroy

At best, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is meaningless.

It’s a burgerless Hard Rock Café, just a bunch of old people’s shit festering in glass cases getting gawked at for $22 a head.

At worst, it presents yet another opportunity for baby boomers to suck themselves off for being the supposed Alpha and Omega of pop-cultural history.

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But weren’t they were wonderfully, funderfully cah-ray-zee back then? You know, back before they became soulless cogs in the corporate machine because they decided that “dreams” and “ideals” weren’t lucrative enough.

Way to stick it to “The Man,” guys.
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I don’t mean to disrespect those who blazed the trail for today’s rockers, but rock and roll history is still being written. It’s too sprawling, too insane and too explosive to be contained in some goofy glass pyramid in downtown Cleveland.

To quote Johnny Rotten, “It’s what these people have done that’s relevant, not what they wore while doing it.”

Long story short, I usually meet the Hall’s yearly induction ceremony with a resounding “meh.”

But not on March 10.

If you haven’t heard yet, Madonna was one-fifth of the Hall of Fame’s Performer Class of 2008. For initially unknown reasons, she refused to perform. In her place, Iggy and the Stooges did a run through of “Ray of Light” and “Burning Up” as an apparent tribute.

When I first heard this, I was floored.

Madonna, for all her fame, hasn’t accomplished much of artistic note. She released a few catchy dance-pop singles in the ‘80s, then hopped on whichever musical bandwagon could generate her the most cash for the rest of her career.

She also got naked a lot in the early ‘90s, which is the only part of her career that I can give my full support (and I’m sure her tits could use a little more of that nowadays).

Hiyo!

But seriously folks. Madonna is a shrewd businesswoman, but not much else.

The Stooges helped create an entire sub-genre of rock in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It’s called punk. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

They’re also not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite being on the nomination ballot six times.

You can see why this solidified my view that those in charge of the induction process are woefully out of touch, at times to the point of outright disrespect.

Then I read this article from the March 10 issue of the Detroit Free Press.

According to Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, it was Madonna herself who approached the band to perform in her place as a way of protesting their repeated snubbing by the Hall’s voters.

After reading this, I was floored yet again, and not just because Madonna acknowledged the importance of someone other than herself.

Rather, this struck me because Madonna represents the epitome of trend-riding pop plasticity and poseurdom. So when even she calls out this operation as bullshit, albeit indirectly, it says a lot about how hollow this whole “pantheon of rock” thing rings.

So for me, it’s back to “meh.”