All (two?) of you Rush fans cam shut up now

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/rush-public-enemy-and-heart-to-join-rock-hall-of-fame/

Good to know that the term "rock and roll" is only a euphemism (that's not a Rush comment).

Rock and roll stopped being a sound and started being an attitude that informed a sound before the progenitors of the original form had even been glossed over by payola. Public Enemy deserve to be inducted more than Rush or any of the legion of 80s bands you don't listen to but would no doubt trumpet as more deserving of the term than rappers.

But but but rap isn't real music!!11!1!

YOU SHUT YOUR FILTHY MOUTH

If you say so.

I actually do like Rush a little bit, btw. Love me some Heart.

I gave that a Like for the words you used, not your intent in using them.

Now get off my lawn.

I guess I should go ahead and disagree that PE deserves the induction more than Rush does, but I agree that the both groups deserve the recognition. Generally, though, I think the RRHoF is pretty much a joke and it's not worth taking any of these things too seriously.

Sorry gramps! *thumbs nose, hitches up overalls, takes slingshot and rides my two-wheeler away*

I am a big fan of Rush - and of Public Enemy. Rush deserves to be inducted for not only a body of work that's constantly evolved over the years but for being one of the last of the prog-rock bands still standing and relevant today; but Public Enemy also has earned a spot for bringing rap music together with rock not only in style but in practice. Their collaboration with Anthrax was the precursor to the rap/rock hybrids that would follow (for better or worse, you can't deny their influence on rock and roll) and I'd call them probably one of the three most influential and important rap/hip-hop acts of the last thirty years.

Who would be your other two? I'm no hip hop historian, but maybe Sugar Hill Gang and uh, Jay-Z?

Sugar Hill Gang and NWA would be the first that came to mind. Jay-Z is successful - but he's not particularly innovative, influential, or important unless you're looking at things in the terms of artist-as-celebrity.

Also, Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, LL Cool J, KRS-One, A Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys. This is a long list before it hits Jay-Z.

Randy Newman gets in before Deep Purple?

Donna Summer gets in before Yes? Before the Moody Blues? Before just about anybody?


There are many ways to play.

I was trying to find an authoritative list on the internet, but I have no idea who is authoritative. BET had Dre at 3, Jay-Z at 2, and 2Pac at 1, fwiw. They had Sugarhill Gang at 11, NWA at 6, and Public Enemy at 9. It's not in a list format, so that's all I'm typing up. "Influential" is a pretty nebulous criteria, though. Do older artists get more points because they've had more successors to influence? Should you try to guess at Jay-Z's influence on future rappers? Does everyone wanting to be Jay-Z count for anything, even if they aren't directly imitating his style?

Rush is cool, I like Rush, but they aren't particularly challenging or game changing. Their music is free of anger or controversy. Public Enemy embodies rock and roll attitude - their music is intense, angry, and timely. Public Enemy could scare your parents - get you in trouble. Nobody ever got sent home from school for singing a Rush song.

I mean, they dedicated a whole section of a song to shitting on Elvis. That's attitude.

EDIT: since when do people give a shit about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Did no one mention Run-DMC yet because they're already in?

Rush was pretty game-changing once Peart started doing the writing.

I hate Rush, but I respect them. It's mainly the vocals that make me want to kill myself. Oh, and the way Rush fans go all "you don't get it man" when you sort of say you aren't a huge fan. Great musicians that play music that I abhor and yet millions of people will cut you with a doughnut if they could if they learn you don't like Rush. Rock on! Sort of...

Of Salesman!

This is absolutely true. Putting aside for a second that I just don't really like Rush's music very much, PE is one of the most important and influential bands of my lifetime; their influence spreads far wider than Rush's. The only way they wouldn't deserve to be in the hall of fame is if you just don't consider rap to be a subset of "rock and roll," and in that case fine I guess, but "rock and roll" doesn't really have a technical definition and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's definition includes rap.

If I concede that we must live with the Hall of Fame's definition of rock and roll and the Hall's definition includes lots of music that objectively is NOT rock and roll, can I get a concession in return that artists inducted should be only those whose music is less painful to listen to than having your skin peeled off in little strips? And that therefore Public Enemy should be barred at the door?

Probably not.

Wow, can we please split hairs about what musical acts fit into what genres? What an interesting topic of discussion!

It may not -- probably isn't -- interesting, but that doesn't mean it's not valid. Let me know when Led Zeppelin is inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Honest question: Have you heard them since, like, 1982? Geddy hasn't been really screechy in a long time. He's still a tenor, probably, but his voice is way less offputting than in the early days. (Even I'm not a big fan of their really early stuff much, like, pre-Permanent Waves.)

Complaints about Geddy's voice are sort of outdated in the same way criticisms of Peart's lyrics about Ayn Rand are. They've moved on.

If you want it to be valid, please provide this objective definition of "rock and roll." As it stands you've only posted snark about how much you hate rap music and how it's "objectively not rock and roll," which is neither interesting nor valid.

2002.

No, I started this and I'll end it. I'm prepared to accept the Hall's definition, which until recently included just about everything except prog, which makes less sense than anything I've said. Rock is what the Hall says it is, at least for the purpose of this discussion, and we all agree, who really cares about the Hall anyway?

Instead of snarky, I'll just be blunt and walk away -- I think rap is horrid, unlistenable noise and I don't know why anyone would want to listen to it. That's not to denigrate its place as art -- there are plenty of paintings I wouldn't want on my wall but recognize as art. However, I "get" other genres even if I don't care for them -- country, opera, metal, for example. I don't "get" rap at all. Let's just say the failing is mine, I'm wrong and a close-minded old fogey and not fight about it.

I don't care how old and white you are (I am old and white), you cannot listen to Bring the Noise without tapping your feet.

I think my foot may have just shifted slightly.

Determining influence is of course entirely subjective but I do think that acts that have been around longer naturally exert more influence and I think standing the test of time is part of being influential. Also, as you say, how do you determine influence on future music.

I would also say being innovative is a requirement for influential, if you're not doing something different and are entirely derivative I don't see how you can be influential. With that, being a pioneer in a musical genre immediately ups your influence rating significantly in my eyes. I mean how could Jay-Z exist if it weren't for the artists of the Bronx music scene in the 70s?

That said influence can be more direct, Dr. Dre for example has produced tons of other artists and brought them to prominence, such as Snoop Dogg and Eminem. That sort of direct influence has to be taken into account as well. There's also cultural influence and not purely artistic influence, I think 2Pac is a good example of someone who's influenced the culture around the art more than the art itself. Although, I think much of that influence has been postmortem. 2Pac was also clearly successful in life, I'm just not sure he'd be as influential had he not died and died in the manner that he did.

For the record, Rush is an incredibly influential band. I have no idea how to measure the influence of Rush vs. Public Enemy. I think both deserve to be in the HoF. But Rush had to wait a lot longer, and that oversight is ridiculous. I'm just glad it's been fixed. I'm not a huge Rush fan or anything (though I like some of their stuff, like YYZ and a few others), but they've had a big influence on a LOT of musicians.

I saw Public Enemy on the Fear Of A Black Planet tour, and it was by far the best rock show I saw that year.

Leaving aside the many problematic aspects of this statement, a lot of brilliant, groundbreaking music could fairly be called horrid, unlistenable noise. For example, here's the first track off Converge's Jane Doe, which Decibel not unreasonably deemed the best metal album of the 2000s:

Not sure about this bit, as Run DMC did their collaboration with Aerosmith on "Walk This Way" years before PE and Anthrax, even including a music video in which both bands appeared together. This collab is credited with saving a near-death Aerosmith (for good or ill) as well as bringing hip-hop to the rock and roll masses. To put in perspective on how early Run DMC made this pioneering move, this was the same year (1986) that the Beasite Boys released their breakout License to Ill and a year before N.W.A. or Public Enemy released their respective studio debuts.

eta: ah yeah, found it. The Fat Boys also led in rock collaboration, working with Chubby Checker on a remake of "The Twist" in 1987 that got tons of radio play and made the charts and with the Beach Boys on a new song "Wipeout". Probably not as super-significant as these other collabs except that they did add to the bridge between hip-hop and rock by putting some of the musicians our parents knew and loved together with kids-these-days rappers.

Make no mistake, I'm extremely happy to see P.E. get their due recognition in the hall of fame, but their importance is quite different from crossing hip-hop into mainstream rock IMO. I expect we'll see more hip-hop groups inducted as the years go by since one of the hall of fame's rules is the band has to be around for 25 years before nomination.

For me, I think the importance of Public Enemy was how, undeniably to my ears, they were the black version of punk rock.

Not in the Bad Brains sense of creating a genre or anything, but in the spirit of true punk. It used to blow my mind how regimented music and music fans used to be in the 80s. The Oz's of the world back then were everywhere - metal guys would yell at punks because punk isn't music, and then punks would turn around and do the same thing to hip-hop. Those musical divisions never made sense to me at all. Sure, there'd be crossover - you could get metal dudes to listen to the Bad Brains, and every punk I knew had a Slayer album somewhere hidden on their shelf - but until PE you could never get hardcore or metal dudes to listen to rap at all. Even though rap and hip-hop come from the same place as punk - a desire to express yourself musically through any means possible, regardless of technique. Punk said anybody could get up on stage with a guitar and play; hip-hop said fuck, man, you don't even need the guitar.

Also, PE were one of the first rap bands* to demand you engage them on an intellectual level. Early hip-hop and rap was mostly party music. That's not a slight on the music itself, just more of a understanding of what it was and who it was for. Sure, Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" brought some social commentary into the mix, but that stuff seemed few and far between. Public Enemy stormed out of the gate calling rap "the black man's CNN", pushed their politics right up front. So the punks that were attracted to the form as a means of social expression suddenly took notice. And once you cranked the shit out of "She Watch Channel Zero", with that insane Slayer sample from "Angel Of Death", then even the metal guys had to admit that was some hardcore motherfucking shit.

So yeah, man. Public fucking Enemy. I once got to shake Carleton Ridenhour's hand, and I thanked him for making two of the best goddamned records of the 80s. I meant it then, and I still do.

* Boogie Down Productions was the other big one, but I can't remember if It Takes A Nation Of Millions came out before BDP's awesome Ghetto Music: The Blueprint Of Hip-Hop.

True that. I recall an interview with Jello Biafra sometime in the 90s in which he opined (no doubt with some ironic ennui, but nevertheless) that gangster rap was the last real punk music left.

To put far too fine a point on it: Hip hop, like the blues, like old school working class country and western, like rock and roll, is a folk art.

Sure, I love listening to music that has a more artistic bent to it - to address another topic of conversation in this same thread, prog-rock pushes the "folk" line about as far as it can go before crossing it - but rock and roll and nearly all of its derivatives, and hip-hop and nearly all of its derivatives, are music by the people, for the people. That is what distinguishes shitty manufactured "pop" or fake manufactured rappers from the real deal; when you're making music to make music, when you're singing about partying, or life on the street, or life in your bedroom, or life in Berlin, or politics, or being poor, or being middle class and stuck in the prep school rut, or rock and roll itself, or the dinosaurs of the 60s collapsing the folk art in on itself with their pretensions, and how all of that makes you feel as a kid, and then how all of that makes you feel as a 40-something who has weathered it all, and then as a 70-something who is seeing his dying days, that's folk art.

Agreed; Run DMC is one of the very few hip-hop groups that you could make the case for being even more influential than Public Enemy. Snap judgment, I'd put PE third probably, behind Run DMC and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

To me PE's hip-hop/rock hybridization is innovative if not revolutionary, but that's only one facet of their importance. They were a real driver of the genre into more serious, intellectual, and political subject matter and as such represent a big maturation of the form (even if that maturation is sadly still not the dominant element thereof). They also innovated on a technical level probably even more in their pure hip-hop work than they did in mixing hip-hop with conventional rock. And even though he didn't invent it, Flavor Flav is kind of the quintessential hype man and probably had a hand in cementing that concept in the structure of hip-hop bands.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to imagine the best of what today's hip-hop has to offer without Public Enemy having happened first.

Honest answer, I probably haven't heard anything new from Rush since the 80's. They were just very offputting to me back then, as were their fans. You make a very valid point, and I should have stuck to my (mostly adhered to here) policy of not posting in threads about things that people are passionate about that I know very little about. I should have stayed out of this one, but I was a bit charged up because I had accidentally posted something earlier that got some likes.

I recommend that you (and any other haters) revisit Rush. My personal favorite Rush album, Power Windows, bears little resemblance to what non-Rush fans tend to think of the band's music.