Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's assesment of Yes

 

I have an Animal House film comparison--the R&RHOF is like the stuck-up Omega Theta Pi fraternity whilst we are the Deltas. Go do your little ceremonies while we'll just listen to the greatest music ever.

 

+1

 

No, Micky, I will have to disagree -- and for all intents and purposes, I believe I have a functioning rational mind (even with evidence to the contrary ).

 

Rock and Roll is certainly an American art form originally, that diverged from blues roots in the 50s, and progressed along different lines to eventually encompass the prog rock of the 70s. The prog-rock bands of the 70s like Yes, ELP, Genesis, Tull, and whoever, will tell you they were indeed rock bands, just like The Beatles, Sabbath, Zeppelin and The Who. Nobody in the 60s or 70s differentiated them as separate entities, or considered them as some kind of different music, whatever trappings they added to the rock form.

 

However, rap is and has never been a rock form -- it originated from black funk and R&B roots in the 70s. The original rap groups would laugh at you if you insisted they had anything whatsoever to do with "rock" or "rock and roll". There may have been efforts to fuse rap and rock later on (like Run-DMC, or even much later Kid Rock), but that's just it, an attempt to fuse two disparate genres.

 

I think the "Rock and Roll of Fame" is a misnomer and should be changed post-haste. It should be referred to as the "Pop Music Hall of Fame" and forget about any pretense of rock or rock and roll with all the inane revisionism and homogenization and back flip rationalizations it uses to add acts that never were considered rock or rock and roll (and performers who never considered themselves to be either). Because rock and roll it ain't.

But...but...that would remove all our righteous rock 'n' roll indignation against the establishment, dude.