Text written by Lucas David
Last week, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame released the list of artists who are now part of the Hall of Fame. This list of nominees has always caused great controversy by including names that, for many, should not be part of a Hall that serves to bring the best of rock to its pantheon.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is a museum and institution dedicated, as the name suggests, to recording the history of some of the best-known and most influential artists, producers, and other people who have had a major impact on the industry, not only of rock but also of pop. Some of the inductions we see – Madonna , ABBA , and Jay-Z , inducted this year – seem strange because these names, while contributing to music in some way, are not bands that contributed to rock, that took it out of the underground and presented it to the masses.
To leave out a band like Iron Maiden , which took 50 years to be nominated for the award, is to deny that their music was so important to the scene. Many bands took years to be nominated and inducted, such as Deep Purple, Alice Cooper , and Kiss , and this seems to demonstrate a certain disregard from the institution towards these classic bands. Heavy Metal owes its foundation today to these bands; Iron Maiden helped define a style that lives on to this day.
In 2018, Maiden's vocalist Bruce Dickinson said that the band should have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame, adding, "Actually, I consider the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be a complete and utter load of rubbish. It's run by hypocritical American bastards who wouldn't know what rock is even if you punched them in the face. They need to stop taking Prozac and start drinking a damn beer." It's also worth noting that bands like Judas Priest and Motörhead aren't part of the group either. As the great host of the defunct That Metal Show , Eddie Trunk, , "This is the Rock & Roll Hall of Shame."
