Should the Smiths get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Should they get in: yes or no?

  • Yes!

    Votes: 34 82.9%
  • No!

    Votes: 7 17.1%

  • Total voters
    41

thewarroom

Scorpion Kicker
Why not? REM got in!! Do you think that, in the grand scheme of things, the Smiths have had enough influence to make it in?

Note: I don't think that they are eligible for another two years, or 25 years after their first single was released.
 
Depends. the R&RHoF has been shown to mean less as time goes on, (edit: if it ever meant anything) as most all of those corporate awards do, but they deserve to be honored. I voted "yes", although I am sympathetic, I think, to Danny's viewpoint.

They could always ignore it if they didn't want it. You know Mike Joyce would show up though. :p
 
They could always ignore it if they didn't want it. You know Mike Joyce would show up though. :p

No kidding. Maybe Mike, Johnny, Andy, and Craig would show up. Not to mention James Maker. :D
 
"Rock and roll" is one of those terms with a slippery meaning. Sometimes it means something fairly neutral and descriptive, sometimes it almost amounts to an ideology.

If it's neutral, then yeah, The Smiths belong there. They are a "rock" band in the loosest sense of the term, they were all fine musicians, and like many of the best artists in the Hall of Fame they carried within them the whole history of rock and pop music. If rock music had never existed you could take The Smiths' DNA and clone the whole spectrum.

I don't think it's a neutral term though. To me "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" sounds like a lot of people who share a particular worldview, a way of making music tied in very closely with a lot of larger trends that are at best annoyingly banal at worst terrifyingly backwards. I wouldn't want The Smiths to be associated with that nonsense. They were better than that.
 
When I checked the list of previous inductees, it more like a list of the vanguards of popular music since 1955. Certainly bands like Aerosmith, the Ramones, and Van Halen aren't "ideologically" similar to The Bee Gees, the Staple Singers, and Bobby Darin. But they do all hold a special place in the music business, and they helped the genre to evolve.
 
Couldn't care less. At least it's not a Grammy award now they are the pits.
 
When I checked the list of previous inductees, it more like a list of the vanguards of popular music since 1955. Certainly bands like Aerosmith, the Ramones, and Van Halen aren't "ideologically" similar to The Bee Gees, the Staple Singers, and Bobby Darin. But they do all hold a special place in the music business, and they helped the genre to evolve.

When you say that disparate bands helped "the" genre to evolve you're implying that many different artists are special yet also participate in a larger whole, which is exactly what I find so objectionable about the Hall of Fame. I don't mind the academic point that from the widest historical perspective The Smiths are part of the same family tree as (pick any four artists out of a hat) Deep Purple, Abba, James Brown, and Otis Redding. But the Hall of Fame and its acolytes do more than represent the artists as such. They try to force them into a continuum, "the rock and roll spirit", as seen every year in the disgusting "all-star" jam at the end of the show in which a dozen or more individuals players are melted down into a slag pool of noise. (The epitome of this is U2's recent video in which fifty years of pop and rock musicians are edited into the same video as if they were all playing the same song.) I find it meaningless and insulting. The differences between the artists are greater than their similarities. It's as if we'd expect Morrissey to be overjoyed at being inducted into Charles Darwin's Hall of Fame alongside Bonzo The Chimp.
 
Where is the 'I don't give a shit' option?
 
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