“Is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Administering an ‘Ethics Code’ in Leaving out the Second-Tier Grunge Bands?”

I can just see having a heated, cantankerous rivalry with the dude picking the RRHOF nominees, where I see him and I’m like, “Hello, Newman!” He’s probably some coke-snorting, leather-clad ’80s dude who worships Eddie Van Halen and has a Guns ’n Roses tattoo. 

And trust me: I’m not losing much if any sleep about who gets into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sure, you could probably trot out any number of iconoclastic cliches to hurl at the establishment: it’s a “popularity contest,” it’s a “little crowd,” it’s “one hand washing the other,” yada yada yada. 

The fact is, though, that especially given how originally entrenched rock and roll is in America, and how popular and vital it’s been over the years, it is still a nation with a stark, unconscionable shortage of awards, adulations and general congenial acknowledgements of musicians and their strident accomplishments. And don’t even get me into a discussion of their feeble potential for getting adequately paid for their work, these days. So I guess you could say the RRHOF to me is like a quick suck of water in a cultural desert: ultimately insufficient and not completely satisfying, but still something I’m not going to abstain from lapping up, from the pure basis of need on my part.

In the title I mention the concept of an “ethics code,” which is something baseball uses in its Hall of Fame selection to determine moral qualification for induction. It’s particularly instrumental in this sport’s pantheon because of the widespread presence in the game of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and this exact violation encompasses the most common violation of the ethics code. The one famous exception would be Pete Rose, who still stands outside the Hall of Fame for his gambling-related transgressions. 

And of course, this is generally a pretty subjective matter and a hard thing to measure successfully, but everybody knows grunge bands did a bunch of heroin. Alice in Chains, in particular, took it to the extreme and even issued what I think is a pretty petty and foolish endorsement of heroin users, in “Junkhead”: “We are an elite race of our own / The stoners junkies and freaks”. Not surprisingly, lead singer and lyricist Layne Staley ended up fatally OD-ing in 2002 from a heroin-containing “speedball.” Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland has been booked for possession of heroin and again, in a sad, painful portrayal, the appearance of Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell before his 2017 suicide was altered adversely to the point where the onlooker certain suspected a significant amount of hard drugs on his part. 

Now, I listen to all three of these bands on a regular basis, have been for more than two decades, and have never done heroin in my life: in fact I’ve made it a fervent point to never inject drugs because I’m not stupid enough to think I have the power to mentally usurp self-control within a realm that potent. This being said, I do have friends who have done heroin either sporadically or semi-regularly, and I have had one friend OD on the substance. So maybe it’s the case that I tote this element around as something that makes me “cool” and when I hear the addictive madness of Alice in Chains’ “God Smack”; Soundgarden’s “The Day I Tried to Live” or Stone Temple Pilots’ “MC5” [1]. It’s like, I’m rollin’ with the junkies, dude. I’ve got it in my blood. 

I mean, if you let this world choose your identity for you via some sort of default, it will be one of a pathetic consumer whose thought processes, superstitions and inclinations are the exact same as every other needy, flaccid serf out there. We all need something to distinguish us. I think that’s what drove these guys to their treacherous drug use and also what propelled them into making some really brilliant music. For all the visceral, bludgeoning gusto of those last three songs I name, that is, there were tunes like “Don’t Follow”; “Zero Chance” and “Lady Picture Show”: clusters and constellations of melodies and hummable grooves that will ingratiate themselves into your heart as much as “Crimson and Clover” and “Daydream Believer,” if you let them. 

Well, they’ve got The Go-Go’s on the ballot this year, and none of these three bands I’m writing about now. And I know it’s not chic to champion macho, testosterone-fueled rock made by white males these days, although for the record there are almost certainly a wealth of women and black people who enjoy this exact music. The record sales would certainly seem to indicate as much: Soundgarden’s Superunknown DEBUTED at number one on the Billboard charts in 1994, while The Go-Go’s crowning jewel Beauty and the Beat reportedly “rose steadily” before reaching number one. Beauty and the Beat is only  two times platinum in the U.S., furthermore, whereas Superunknown is five, while also having been available for purchase for a lesser time duration and of course, cursorily, probably representing “rock and roll” to a greater degree than the pop-pandering, structurally reductive Go-Go’s [2] [3]. 

A lot of people, though, can stand that “We Got the Beat” song, obviously. I don’t happen to be one of them but I suppose that’s beside the point. But in relation to the idea that the Hall might be looking primarily for some “clean fun” (actually they’re somehwat ironically a drug-free workplace), it certainly potentiates these 1980s do-no-wrong cuties whose idea of being “bad” is probably still skipping out of last hour homeroom to smoke cigarettes.  

.

[1] I realize a lot of people will see this as a bizarre selection but I pick it for the combination of that album’s ruthlessly thick, thunderous mix and the quick pace and seemingly ingenuous, uncontrolled rhythmic infrastructure it contains. For what it’s worth, No. 4 to this day is a really underrated album, one I can listen to straight through and get consistent, multifarious satisfaction. 

.

[2] Indeed, on this whole Go-Go’s album, there’s a total of one song over four minutes, standing in and 4:04, which I suppose shouldn’t completely be a disqualification but also isn’t exactly what most people would describe as blazing a new trail in innovative song structure. 

.

[3] It’s generally held that Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots were about as popular as Soundgarden: sales figures of Dirt are eerily similar to those of Superunknown and STP was lumped into those grunge also-rans which fostered multiple mega-hits on MTV and could fill large concert venues. 

1 thought on ““Is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Administering an ‘Ethics Code’ in Leaving out the Second-Tier Grunge Bands?”

  1. Thanks for the points you have contributed here. Yet another thing I would like to convey is that computer system memory needs generally rise along with other developments in the technologies. For instance, as soon as new generations of cpus are made in the market, there’s usually a related increase in the scale demands of both the pc memory and also hard drive room. This is because the application operated by way of these processor chips will inevitably boost in power to benefit from the new engineering.

Leave a Comment