The Rubberband Starts to Jam

MISSY ELLIOTT! The SPINNERS!! GEORGE MICHAEL!!! KOOL HERC!!!! CHAKA CHAKA CHAKA CHAKA KHAN CHAKA KHAN CHAKA KHAN CHAKA KHAN!!!!!

There are eight other new plaques being prepared for the ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME, including one for a woman who’s never played a concert in the U.S. and one for a man who celebrated his 90th birthday this past weekend with his billionth and billionth-and-first US concerts, and a handful of plaques *not* being prepared that make me want to cancel a few hundred of my fellow voters, as is the case every year. But if you had put those exact five boldface names on your ballot (which you couldn’t since two of them weren’t actually on it) and mailed it to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, you could walk away from the post office knowing you’d just voted for one of the most entertaining and worthy classes in Rock Hall history.

SUPA DUPA FLY. “I’LL BE AROUND.” FAITH. The BACK TO SCHOOL JAM. “SWEET THING.” For all the Hall’s well-chronicled mistakes, oversights and WTFs over the years, that sounds like a concert/party/institution I’d want to fly the flag for. Put all that in a room in your museum and I’ll spend my entire weekend there. Bring on (bring back?) the free-for-all induction night all-star jam, no TV cameras please. Get ur freak on.

But what I really want to use this space for today is to defend one of the weirdest and most indefensible choices the Hall has ever made—reserving one of its precious few awards for “Musical Excellence” for a man who’s never played or written a note of music you’ve ever heard but who did write the words “Marconi plays the mamba” and “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids... And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.” The Hall has an abysmal record of recognizing women for musical excellence, and while it’s been working to fix its gender issues in other areas, it keeps coming up weirdly short on this one. Including Chaka Khan this year, the Hall has recognized two women, ever, for that. It has never recognized CAROL KAYE, DIONNE WARWICK or SHEILA E for their virtuosity, but it has now recognized the man who wrote the words to “CROCODILE ROCK.”

But here’s the thing about BERNIE TAUPIN—those strange and awkward words, some of which sound like he’s writing in an unfamiliar language, tend to sound amazing coming out of ELTON JOHN’s mouth, and Elton John is almost pathologically incapable of writing a good song without them (seriously, check out John’s non-Taupin oeuvre one day when you’re bored). Which means, ironically, that one of rock’s most notoriously awful lyricists is also one of its... “best” would be a strange word to use here... but let’s just say Missy Elliott and future Hall of Famers OUTKAST have nothing on Bernie Taupin when it comes to “weird” and Elton John wouldn’t have come anywhere near the pop charts, never mind the Rock Hall of Fame, without him. And every once in a while he comes up with something genuinely beautiful like “Oh it's ten below zero / And we’re about / To abandon / Our plans for the day.” He was a terrible choice this year and if they need someone to write his plaque, I’ll volunteer in a heartbeat.

Shoutout also SHERYL CROW, AL KOOPER, LINK WRAY, DON CORNELIUS... And RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, who, like Chaka Khan and the Spinners, had been nominated numerous times by the Hall’s nominating committee and rejected numerous times by its 1,200-ish voters. The voters finally said yes to Rage and the Spinners and one of the small insider committees that chooses the specialty honors added Khan to the mix (“We monitor the performers vote and we do watch to see if there’s anything we need to balance,” Hall chair JOHN SYKES told Billboard Wednesday in one of the clearest explanations the Hall has ever made of this part of the process.) Next year, please: The SHANGRI-LAS.

The inductions happen Nov. 3 at BARCLAYS CENTER in Brooklyn.

Etc Etc Etc

BYTEDANCE kills the free version of RESSO, its streaming service for India, Indonesia and Brazil, three of the world’s six biggest countries by population. Forcing users to subscribe “is likely to alienate a significant number of listeners” in those countries, Bloomberg reports, but appears to be part of a wider tech trend toward reducing free services and emphasizing profitability. Will more music services follow?... Judge to jury which began deliberating Wednesday afternoon in the ED SHEERAN / “LET’S GET IT ON” plagiarism case: “Independent creation is a complete defense, no matter how similar that song is"... San Francisco’s public library is partnering with AMOEBA on a BAY BEATS, a music streaming platform for local Bay Area artists, following in the footsteps of libraries in New Orleans, Nashbille and elsewhere.