"P.I.M.P. The S.I.M.P." Rick James Anthology
"Pa Huele" Eddie Palmieri Latin Lounge Jazz: Havana
"Pain" Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse Dark Night of the Soul
"Pain In My Heart" Otis Redding The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968
"Paint" Galactic Ruckus
"Paint a Vulgar Picture" The Smiths Strangeways, Here We Come
"Paint It Black" The Rolling Stones Hot Rocks 1964-1971
"Painting the Town Blue" X More Fun In The New World
"A Pair of Brown Eyes" The Pogues Rum Sodomy & the Lash
"Pala Tute" Gogol Bordelo Trans-Continental Hustle
Johnny Marr, Keith Richard, and Billy Zoom just completely steal all three of their songs from their singers. This is not unique to these songs. (To be fair, I don't think anyone has ever tried to claim Exene & John Doe's vocals were the thing that made X great. Now Moz & Mick, those are different stories).
Today the "Rock Hall" announced their inductees for 2014. From the short list of "finalists" they picked Peter Gabriel, Kiss, Linda Ronstadt, Hall & Oates, Cat Stevens, and Nirvana. Passed over were (among others) Chic, The Meters, and The Replacements.
I stopped caring about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame a while ago. I wish it was longer ago, and I wish it was a more complete disregard, because every year the artists selected, and those overlooked, demonstrate utter stupidity and uselessness of what could be an urgent and useful source of interpretation of a significant pop culture contribution to the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. Instead, it is a castle to baby boomers' vision of themselves as the greatest generation in history. Every year, the hall picks artists based on some arcane criteria that remain unpublished and incalculable. There is no reasonable measure by which Kiss matters. They were a delusion, a bizarre, inexplicable phenomenon on a par with Loverboy. Frankie Goes to Hollywood ruled the world briefly - I promise they will never be inducted in that weird, disappointing pyramid. Hell - literally every artist on the little playlist above is more worthy of inclusion than Kiss or Hall & Oates. (I recognize that H & O has their gen-x defenders - these are my people, and they are wrong).
It is easy to beat on the Rock Hall because it has taken on, in some ways, an impossible task. It is a museum dedicated to an interactive art. The purpose of popular music is to engage the audience - the performer is consistently in communication with the audience. Maybe this is the essence of all art, and especially all performing art. With "rock," though, it is particularly true - the music was (is?), at its source, intended to be heard live, and the mythology of rock has always involved live performance in many of its important moments. The Moondog Ball, Ed Sullivan's presentations of Elvis and The Beatles, Hendrix at Woodstock, even the tragedies of Altamont & The Who in Cincinnati. There is, in live music, always the sense of the unknown, the unexpected, the idea that even though you, as the audience, have heard these songs before . . . This time, this show, something different, something amazing, something different will happen, and you will be there for it. [see - this] The Grateful Dead became a famous live act based on this suggestion of the unknown, and the Replacements became an infamous one for the same reason. Yet the Rock Hall is charged with trying to codify, solidify, render known and permanent this fluid, amorphous art. To name something is in some ways to kill it. A dictionary for a living language is obsolete the moment it is published.
Even recognizing this natural limitation, the Rock Hall in Cleveland misses the target so badly as to be willfully useless. In fact, it doesn't seem to fight against this stasis, this pointlessness. It embraces it. There is no effort to contextualize, to modernize, to render the place useful in any way whatsoever. It is not a "museum" in the sense of a learning institute - a place to learn and contextualize the art in either history or a broader culture. It is a shrine, holding sacred items for a handful of pilgrims who need to come and genuflect before Jerry Garcia's bong and Jim Morrison's codpiece.
The first few times I went, I left feeling frustrated and angry that the museum was not living up to the promise of what I thought it ought to be. It could be a place dedicated to embracing, pursuing, contextualizing, hell even advancing popular music. But no - it was just a nightmare shitshow capturing a brief period of the past and doing that poorly. There is no legitimate live music space in the Rock Hall. I have seen shows there twice, and they set up folding chairs and a stage in the lobby. This alone speaks volumes - there is a theater with three giant screens playing clips of the "inductees" - the music of the past. But there is no space for the music of the present or the future.
I gave up on the Rock Hall when I realized that the problem was me. If you have ever watched The Beverly Hillbillies or The Addams Family you understand that the central conceit is that other people come into the homes of the Clampetts or the Addamses and they are frustrated, befuddled, and frequently overwhelmed by the experience. But this is always because those people are bringing in their own expectations to the house. It isn't the fault of the Clampetts or the Addamses that others don't get them. It is the same thing with the hall. Morticia is cutting off her roses. Granny is just cooking her stew. Jann Wenner is masturbating onto Robert Plant's fringe jacket. This is their home, and it isn't my place to tell them what they are doing is wrong.
Part of the issue is that the term "rock & roll" itself is vague and undefined - is it a particular style of popular music, guitar-driven, 4/4 time? Is it a more expansive definition encompassing most forms of electrified popular music? Something in between? Apparently it includes shitty quasi-folk music by American white men (James Taylor - inducted 2000). But it won't include black american artists like Chic, NWA or the Meters. It also does not include any electronic artist like Can, Kraftwerk, or Giorgio Morodor. Most galling personally is the refusal to acknowledge the music of my own youth. Nirvana is a step, a necessary one, and a given. The Replacements, Husker Du, Black Flag, X . . . the frustrated rock music of the Reagan 80s (and the concurrent rage in Thatcher's England - Joy Division, Wire . . .) is without representation. To see Hall & Oates inducted over the 'Mats is just to relive the frustration between the mainstream radio and the music I and my friends were actually listening to at the time.
All that said, I have no use for the Rock Hall as it is. I want it to be more than it is, and it won't be. It is too narrow, too stationary, too . . . ancient. We now have over 100 years of recorded sound, and are at least 60 years into the "rock & roll" era. Despite this, the Rock Hall looks only at a very narrow slice of that time (and heaven forbid it expand its vision geographically beyond the US and England - Neil Young and Rush excepted). I want it to be more than it is, and it won't be. So I am tired of frustrating myself by expecting more from it. In the meantime . . . I like some Peter Gabriel and Cat Stevens.
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