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| - James Taylor is a member of the "Rock and Roll" Hall of Fame.
And ________ is/are not. (Call me an idiot, but I would insert the Minutemen in that blank. Or maybe Wire. But for purposes of this exercise, it could be any one of about 500 deserving performers....)
Seriously, this is just silly. James Taylor has spent 40 years lolllygagging through his limpid catalogue, doing anything but rocking and rolling. I realize James Taylor seems like a nice fella and has his easy-going, mellow appeal.
But NOBODY can seriously call this guy a "rock and roll" performer.
Instead, James Taylor should be the presiding god in the Easy Listening Hall of Fame.
So, yeah, my beef is just a subjective scream in the wilderness. Any one of the millions of visitors to the R&RHOF could come up with his or her own personal grievance about who's ludicrously included or scandalously excluded from this Rock and Roll Pantheon. (To the many, many fans of the fine and mellow gentleman JT, please accept for my apology for the wicked calumny I use to make this very minor point.)
But what you can't objectively deny is that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems like the version of rock-and-roll history that Rolling Stone magazine has been propagating for almost 45 years, i.e., a purely Boomer-centric take on how everything has gone down over the last six decades. Hats are studiously and appropriately doffed to the blues and country artists whose brew led to rock and roll, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does a really nice job with this history.
But the overall message you come away with, as you always do with hardcore Boomer culture, is that everything dovetailed into magic and peaked in the 1960s. Everything after is just an afterthought and a footnote. (By saying this, I don't mean to suggest that there wasn't plenty of great stuff from the 1960s...)
And the basement floor, which contains the primary permanent exhibits, is quite the hodge-podge, and it gets a quite crowded trying to read all of the small-ish text accompanying the various mementos, photos, and stagewear. There's a small room devoted to Midwestern acts, which is a nice touch but which is similarly cluttered.
One regrettable thing about the R&RHOF is that much of its archival footage, which was probably a great thing about the museum when it opened, has been rendered almost obsolete by the Internet and especially YouTube, which is an amazing treasure-trove of free rock video.
Anybody who has even a mild interest in popular music of the last 55 or 60 years should check out the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if they visit Cleveland. But as others say, it's a little bit underwhelming.
P.S. What Steve W. mentions about the free admission for folks who present a CD that they personally appear on is a cool and honorable thing for the R&RHOF to do.
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