Chrissie Hynde and Courtney Love have added their names to the list of artists who have spoken out publicly against the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Hynde wrote on Facebook Friday that “if anyone wants my position on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame they are welcome to it. I don’t even wanna be associated with it. It’s just more establishment backslapping. I got in in a band so I didn’t have to be part of all that.”
She added, “I was living a happy life in Rio when I got the call that I was to being inducted. My heart sank because I knew I’d have to go back for it as it would be too much of a kick in the teeth to my parents if I didn’t. I’d upset them enough by then, so it was one of those things that would bail me out from years of disappointing them (like moving out of the U.S.A. and being arrested at PETA protests and my general personality).
“Other than Neil Young’s participation in the induction process, the whole thing was, and is, total bollocks.
“It’s absolutely nothing to do with rock ‘n’ roll and anyone who thinks it is is a fool.”
She didn’t say why she had chosen this time to rant against the establishment — which is in Cleveland in her birth state of Ohio — but it’s being speculated that it was in response to an opinion piece by Courtney Love that ran the same day in the British newspaper The Guardian.
In it, Love took the Rock Hall to task for what she called its “reek of sexist gatekeeping, but also purposeful ignorance and hostility” towards women. She used three examples:
- Rock ‘n’ roll progenitor Sister Rosetta Tharp, who was honored with a U.S. Postage Stamp 20 years before the Rock Hall inducted her.
- Kate Bush, whose groundbreaking accomplishments as a British female singer have to date been ignored, though she’s on the ballot this year.
- And Chaka Khan, who Love says, “has been the Queen of Funk since she was barely out of her teens,” and is in the same league as Aretha Franklin as a singer. Love points out that after seven Rock Hall nominations, she has never received enough votes for induction.
Love also pointed out that to date women only comprise eight-and-a-half percent of the Rock Hall’s inductees and concluded by writing that “if the Rock Hall is not willing to look at the ways it is replicating the violence of structural racism and sexism that artists face in the music industry, if it cannot properly honor what visionary women artists have created, innovated, revolutionized and contributed to popular music — well, then let it go to hell in a handbag.”
Other artists who have railed against the Hall include Young, Steve Miller, Todd Rundgren, Ozzy Osbourne, KISS, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, and The Sex Pistols.
