ABSTRACT
When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted its first class of honorees in 1986, the choices were not difficult to justify. Pioneering 1950s icons such as Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley were all integral and well-established figures in rock’s historical narrative. By the late 1990s/2000s, however, as many major artists from the 1970s and 1980s became eligible, and then repeatedly passed over, for induction, the Rock Hall’s induction process and evaluative criteria increasingly became a topic of conversation and debate.1 Many wondered, for example, if there was a bias against progressive rock, a genre that despite its sizeable fan base, had rarely been received favorably among critics. In his 2010 editorial, published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (the leading newspaper of the Rock Hall’s home city), John Covach, a music theorist at the University of Rochester and Eastman School of Music, and a rock historian who has written widely on progressive rock, states the case for one of the genre’s most important bands, Yes.2 Given Yes’s stature, Covach believes their absence from the Rock Hall shows a decided lack of historical objectivity. This raises questions of how exactly one measures musical and artistic value. Is it through record sales? Critical acclaim? Innovation? Influence? Social or cultural context? How do artists enter a canon such as the Rock Hall, and what kind of story does that canon tell?
