In between watching recorded shows last night, I came across the live feed of this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.  I felt the need to comment on two of the inductees, as one group is currently a train wreck and one group needs more acknowledgement.

First, Van Halen’s participation was an absolute joke.  Eddie Van Halen just checked into rehab and Alex Van Halen and David Lee Roth also weren’t there.  I’m assuming Alex wasn’t there because Eddie wasn’t there and the brothers hate both singers and are estranged from Michael Anthony.  The two outcasts, Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar, wound up performing, backed by Paul Schaefer’s band.  So instead of having the whole band there and maybe one singer singing one of their songs each, you have the second of three singers playing with a bassist who didn’t leave the band voluntarily.  Being backed up by the band that plays on the Late Night with David Letterman Show, with no disrespect to the awesome musicians in that band, was not really “rock and roll” when it comes to the zeitgeist of the times when they were on top of the world.

Next up was the first rap band ever inducted into the Hall – Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.  Having grown up in an urban environment and being exposed to nothing but rap until I was in high school, I was pleased to see this addition to the Hall of Fame, since “rock and roll” is a generic term in my eyes.  What was partially sad was that two of the members of the Furious Five, in their acceptance speeches, were basically begging the “new school” rappers to collaborate on projects.  Is this how the new kids pay respects to their elders in their genre?  The innovators of rap are reduced to begging for work?  If you look at the Billboard charts the past 6 or 7 years, just about EVERY rap song is a collaboration with another rapper or rocker or R&B artist.  In fact, I think any rap song released in the past 6 years that doesn’t have the word “featuring” in it is an aberration.  It’s one incestuous stew of collaborated tripe and not much originality.  I would like to think that even if I were an impressionable teenager in this day and age, I wouldn't listen to crap like that.

Gone are the days of great rock and rap mixes like Run DMC and Aerosmith or even the “Judgment Night” movie soundtrack.  It’s all about foisting unheard artists on popular artists CDs.  While that might be good for a new artist trying to break into the business (see Snoop Dogg on Dr Dre’s “The Chronic” album as a good exception), it really should be used sparingly.  If I’m wanting to buy a new album from, say, U2, the last thing I want is 8 of the 12 songs to have other artists I've never heard of muddling up the sound.

Anyway, back to the ceremony, here we have one of rap’s pioneers and they have to publicly beg for a job?  These young artists really suck if that truly is the case.  Would the Rolling Stones ever have to beg to collaborate with young artists?  Maybe that’s not a good example to use since they’re still wildly successful but you get the point.  Maybe a better example is Lynyrd Skynrd.  Yeah, they’re over the hill and don’t have much new material, but any young rock band that was influenced by them would kill to be on stage with them.

One final note on the Hall ceremonies was that it didn’t appear that the presenters were reading off a teleprompter.  How did I know that?  When Jay-Z introduced Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, he was reading from his Blackberry Pearl and was constantly scrolling the trackball down as he read from the palm of his hand.