![\"\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/rockHOF_.jpeg\" "\\"rockHOF_\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nJames and Alex look at some musicians they feel deserve to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if the Hall probably doesn’t agree with them.<\/em><\/p>\n Last week, the candidates for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame were announced. They weren\u2019t particularly surprising: Public Enemy and N.W.A. were nominated, since the Hall appreciates pioneering hip-hop acts. Rush was nominated too, since the Hall of Fame appreciates the humourous way Geddy Lee pronounces \u2018Tom Sawyer.\u2019 Other nominees this year included Heart, Deep Purple, Kraftwerk, The Meters, Randy Newman, and like forty others. Every year, these announcements happen, and every year we debate them for maybe two minutes, before going back to discussing whether or not Eva Mendes really deserves Ryan Gosling. But regardless of how little average people seem to actually talk about it, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is probably the longest running cultural record of what music matters to the most people. Saying that a band is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will always carry some weight in an argument about a band\u2019s place in history. The Hall is a place for popular and\/or influential bands, but these bands must be particularly popular, or at least influential to a wide number of future bands. Bands like the Velvet Underground have influenced so many people that they\u2019re in the Hall despite the average person not being able to hum the melody to Heroin; Bono\u2019s stupid fucking sunglasses are so well known, and his music so popular, that of course U2 is in there, too. When the Red Hot Chili Peppers were inducted this year, nobody was surprised. With the possible exception of Radiohead, it\u2019s hard to think of a modern band that deserves induction more than the kings of the cock sock.<\/p>\n Bands will continue to be inducted into this Hall of Fame, as that is what happens at Halls of Fame. When they actually happen, the ceremonies themselves will barely register with anybody but the biggest fans of the acts in question, but in time these inductions might be important, or at least interesting in a historical sense. I don\u2019t particularly care if my favourite acts get in, so maybe this pursuit is fruitless; I might care more about who sweeps next year\u2019s Latin Grammys*. But I also spend an inordinate amount of time each year claiming I hate the Academy Awards, so I\u2019m probably just a liar when it comes to all things related to pop cultural awards. And since we MacGuffin Men take great pride in pre-awarding these honours ourselves, to people we think actually deserve them, that\u2019s precisely what we\u2019re going to do.<\/p>\n *Word on the street says Gloria Estefan\u2019s new record will be bumping.<\/em><\/p>\n Obviously. There is simply no way Sean Carter won\u2019t be inducted at some point, probably as soon as the rules allow*. He\u2019s often called the Bob Dylan of hip-hop, but Bruce Springsteen is actually probably a better comparison with the way Hova\u2019s career has gone in the last ten years. Jay-Z has positioned himself as a \u2018man of the people\u2019 in the way no previous hip-hop star ever has, and his albums will continue to sell as long as he continues to make them. His recent set of eight consecutive performances in Brooklyn\u2019s Barclays Center have had an aura of \u2018for the fans\u2019 around them, and nobody pays tribute to where they\u2019re from more than Jay-Z. He is to his hometown borough what The Boss is to New Jersey, and perhaps even more so, given that Hova brought a professional basketball team to that home while Springsteen moved to the west coast.<\/p>\n *An artist is eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record.<\/em><\/p>\n Musically, Jay-Z is the first rapper to release a great, relevant record after turning forty, and he\u2019ll probably be the first to do it after sixty as well… Which is awesome. Jay-Z will make grown man rap inside a genre that overly values immaturity, and he\u2019ll do it on a scale where people actually know it exists (what Jay-Z lacks in doing things first, or best, he makes up for in doing them first in a popular context). The Hall of Fame has been inducting hip-hop legacy members over the past few years (Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC), so the Hall has implicitly said that they value hip-hop. And outside of Run-DMC, no hip-hop artist deserves to be in a museum of popular music more than Jay-Z.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Trying to predict who deserves to be inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 is a difficult task. It\u2019s almost impossible to find a truly popular rock band from the late 1990s that also is widely accepted as good. Pearl Jam was more interesting for fighting TicketMaster than releasing music at that point, and nobody actually enjoyed the music of the Goo Goo Dolls or Matchbox 20 inasmuch as they tolerated it. While it seemed like New Kids on the Block had competition from people with guitars in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the second half of the latter decade felt different. Mo Money Mo Problems had kicked in the door, but hip-hop was still a few years from really taking off in the mainstream, and the dominant form of popular music was inarguably, well, pop music (and perhaps whatever we want to call Carlos Santana\u2019s Supernatural). Nobody who wanted to be taken seriously took these boy bands seriously because – objectively – their music was mostly terrible. But this music was culturally relevant because the people that liked it almost never took it objectively, which is what made it colossally successful. Michael Jackson has been inducted into the Hall of Fame, partially for the fact that he\u2019s inspired pretty much every pop singer to come after him, but also because he sold a shit ton of records. Jackson might have made a better song than any of these boy bands\u2019 entire catalogues put together, but he also made plenty of bullshit like that song with Paul McCartney, which is as least as bad as Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely. By including Jackson, the Hall has recognized pop music (and don\u2019t pretend like he\u2019s a rock artist because of the guitar solos in Dirty Diana and Beat It), and they would be doing a poor job of recognizing pop music without a record of the 1990s boy bands, groups that continue to be influential even though they\u2019re now relegated to Old Navy ads. The music might not be good, but it\u2019s successful, and should probably be inducted, if only by historical default.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These three bands need to be looked at all at once, because of the similarity in their sounds and the timing of their careers. I can see each one of these bands being inducted in isolation, but as they occupy pretty similar spots on the musical spectrum, I doubt it will happen for all of them at the same time. The question then becomes which one of them gets in first when eligibility rolls around, as at least one of them deserves to be first-balloters. Pop punk was a big part of the music scene in the 1990s, and these three bands were a huge part of setting that in motion. It only seems logical that the Hall of Fame accepts pop punk as part of rock and roll, no matter how many parents who love classic rock told their kids these three bands weren’t real rock and roll, with their power chords and lyrics about not being able to land skateboard tricks. The Hall has inducted both pop acts and punk acts, so a combination of the two should fit in. And while I wouldn’t be shocked to see these three pioneers of the subgenre to all make it in someday, it becomes a question of who would make it first.<\/p>\n If only one of these three acts makes it, The Offspring would probably be the worst choice, and not just because they are my least favourite of the three, or the fact that someone in the band is named Noodles. Smash and Americana are both listenable albums, but later Offspring music is all pretty forgettable except Original Prankster, which is memorable mostly for the wrong reasons. Smash was their breakout success, but the \u2018Spring had released albums earlier than their contemporaries, meaning they are eligible before Green Day and Blink 182. This is the only reason they could make it before the other two; as far as the music they created, they deserve that distinction the least. The Offspring didn’t encapsulate teenage angst and insecurity as well as Blink 182 did, and never had long-term cultural relevance, and an eventual political element, the way Green Day did. Being ahead of the curve is definitely something the Hall of Fame would appreciate, but the band doesn’t sum up what the subgenre would do best. Their head start may get them in their first, but if they were all eligible the same year, they’d be most likely to be left out. Also, I can’t justify this one intellectually, but the Offspring are really fucking irritating.<\/p>\n For full disclosure, I will say that Blink 182 is my favourite of the three bands, but I am well aware of their flaws. Tom Delonge was an awful, awful singer at the start of their career, but he has figured out how to fix it. (Of course, now he seems like a total douchebag but I don’t think those two things are entirely related.) Blink 182 was endlessly immature to a fault, and 66% of the founding members never showed any real musical talent. Their immaturity and sense of humour have made me laugh more than probably any other band, but this probably hurts their chances with the Hall of Fame, a group of people that take themselves and their hall very seriously… I can’t imagine these people are going to enjoy mentioning album titles like Take Off Your Pants and Jacket or Enema of the State.<\/p>\n That same immaturity is part of what Blink did well, which was make music about the teenage experience, something they did better than Green Day and The Offspring. Some argue that the band never really matured emotionally or musically, and that this was their problem, but if pop punk is a genre for teenagers then I guess they knew their audience. Dammit, Going Away to College and Adam’s Song will probably hold up as emotionally true and meaningful songs for people of that age for a while to come. With its catchy guitar riff, angsty (but not too angry) lyrics, self-deprecating video and explicitly stated theme of “I guess this is growing up,” Dammit is a good candidate for all-time pop punk anthem, which probably can’t be said about any other song\/subgenre combination. Just that line alone speaks to the confusion and powerlessness that people feel as a teenager, and everything else about the songs works perfectly with it.<\/p>\n The case for Blink 182’s induction is partly for their early success in an emerging genre, but that also goes for Green Day and The Offspring. What separates Blink is that they are the most teenage of those bands, which sounds insulting, but when that is the target of the subgenre, it’s more of a compliment than anything.<\/p>\n However, of the three bands listed here, Green Day is the most logical choice for induction. Although I like Blink 182 more, Green Day is simply more likely Hall of Fame material for a few reasons. They went non-stop since they started, while Blink did break up\/go on hiatus for a time, and The Offspring may as well have, as no one really gave a fuck about them after 2001 anyway. American Idiot and its political sentiments give Green Day the most meaningful album of the three bands, and punk is most appreciated by critics when it can be tied to social commentary (regardless of its listenability).<\/p>\n Pop punk is tough to negotiate because it’s a bit of a paradox. Pop is supposed to be accessible, while the opposite is true of most definitions of punk music. When critics discuss the best punk music, it is usually discussed through the lens of its social significance, which is the case with punk music more so than any other genre. Green Day’s American Idiot phase kept a bit of the edginess of punk in what is close to a pop rock band. No matter how late Green Day’s political angle showed up, its anti-Bush, anti-war elements made the band look more mature and worthy of critical appreciation entirely separate from the actual music. And while Dammit is probably the best song for describing what it’s like to be a teenager, Time of Your Life is the best song for looking back on what it was like to be a teenager. It is a song that I don’t think I ever chose to listen to after hearing it once, and probably never will, but it is one of the biggest songs of their career for good reason. It is sappy and overused but undeniably effective, showing a softer, mature side of the pop punk genre that often lacks such things.<\/p>\n Watching footage of Green Day as they were starting out, it’s hard to call them mature, but they certainly never seemed as juvenile as Blink 182, especially as years went by. They were more mature than Blink, more political than The Offspring and more consistently relevant than both of them and all this makes them the best candidate for the Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nJay-Z<\/h1>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nThe Backstreet Boys \u00a0and\/or \u00a0*NSYNC<\/h1>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nBlink 182 \u00a0and\/or \u00a0Green Day \u00a0and\/or \u00a0The Offspring<\/h1>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nBroken Social Scene<\/h1>\n