THE NOMINEES FOR 12/28:

Bruce Springsteen
Neil Young
The Clash
Elvis Presley
Chuck Berry
Little Richard
Hank Williams
Pearl Jam
Radiohead
The Ramones
Johnny Cash
Black Sabbath
R.E.M.
The Kinks
The Stooges

BOLD = new nominees

The Rules

-This month we will induct 15 artists into our RM Music Hall of Fame. I will list 15 artists, and you guys will have a day or so to cast your vote as to which 5 of the artists listed you think should be inducted. I will keep listing artists until we have 15 artists inducted. In order to be inducted, you must get at least 56% of the vote.
-Next month we will induct 10 artists into our RM Music Hall of Fame. I'll once again list 10 artists, and you'll all have a day to cast your votes as to which 5 should be inducted. We'll keep going until we have 10 artists inducted. In order to be inducted, you must get at least 56% of the vote.
-Every month after that, we will induct a maximum of 5 artists during the first week of the month. I'll list 10 artists, and you'll once again have a day or so to cast your votes as to which 5 artists you think should be inducted. We will keep going throughout the week until we have 5 artists inducted. If for some reason we don't have 5 artists inducted by the end of that week, we will induct however many artists we have. In order to be inducted in these rounds, you must get at least 2/3 of the vote.

THE RM MUSIC HALL OF FAME

After reading the opinions of most of the members here at RM (which is that events like the Grammys and places like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are basically corporate shrines and galas that honor critically acclaimed and commercially palpable artists), it got me to thinking: if RM had our very own music hall of fame, what artists would we induct and why? So I decided to form the RM Music Hall of Fame to find our which artists we here at RM feel have influenced popular music as we know it, for betteor for worse. They can be from any genre and any era of popular music, and other people we feel have made an impact on popular music can also be included. Here is who we have inducted thus far:

Inductees for January, 2006

The Beatles



So much has been said and written about the Beatles — and their story is so mythic in its sweep — that it's difficult to summarize their career without restating clichés that have already been digested by tens of millions of rock fans. To start with the obvious, they were the greatest and most influential act of the rock era, and introduced more innovations into popular music than any other rock band of the 20th century. Moreover, they were among the few artists of any discipline that were simultaneously the best at what they did and the most popular at what they did. Relentlessly imaginative and experimental, the Beatles grabbed a hold of the international mass consciousness in 1964 and never let go for the next six years, always staying ahead of the pack in terms of creativity but never losing their ability to communicate their increasingly sophisticated ideas to a mass audience. Their supremacy as rock icons remains unchallenged to this day, decades after their breakup in 1970. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:wisxlfhe5cqr

The Beach Boys



They are arguably the best American band ever. = flavdave.
Pet Sounds [is] THE album that inspired the Beatles' shift from bubblegum pop to more experimental sounds. = Mickey

Beginning their career as the most popular surf band in the nation, the Beach Boys finally emerged by 1966 as America's pre-eminent pop group, the only act able to challenge (for a brief time) the overarching success of the Beatles with both mainstream listeners and the critical community. From their 1961 debut with the regional hit "Surfin," the three Wilson brothers — Brian, Dennis, and Carl — plus cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine constructed the most intricate, gorgeous harmonies ever heard from a pop band. With Brian's studio proficiency growing by leaps and bounds during the mid-'60s, the Beach Boys also proved to be one of the best-produced groups of the '60s, exemplified by their 1966 peak with the Pet Sounds LP and the number one single "Good Vibrations." Though Brian's escalating drug use and obsessive desire to trump the Beatles (by recording the perfect LP statement) eventually led to a nervous breakdown after he heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the group soldiered on long into the 1970s and '80s, with Brian only an inconsistent participant. The band's post-1966 material is often maligned (if it's recognized at all), but the truth is the Beach Boys continued to make great music well into the '70s. Displayed best on 1970's Sunflower, each member revealed individual talents never fully developed during the mid-'60s — Carl became a solid, distinctive producer and Brian's replacement as nominal bandleader, Mike continued to provide a visual focus as the frontman for live shows, and Dennis developed his own notable songwriting talents. Though legal wranglings and marginal oldies tours during the '90s often obscured what made the Beach Boys great, the band's unerring ability to surf the waves of commercial success and artistic development during the '60s made them America's first, best rock band. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:jtkcu3t5anok

Bob Dylan



Bob Dylan's influence on popular music is incalculable. As a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-conscious narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the notions that in order to perform, a singer had to have a conventionally good voice, thereby redefining the role of vocalist in popular music. As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music, including electrified folk-rock and country-rock. And that just touches on the tip of his achievements. Dylan's force was evident during his height of popularity in the '60s — the Beatles' shift toward introspective songwriting in the mid-'60s never would have happened without him — but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent generations. Many of his songs became popular standards, and his best albums were undisputed classics of the rock & roll canon. Dylan's influence throughout folk music was equally powerful, and he marks a pivotal turning point in its 20th century evolution, signifying when the genre moved away from traditional songs and toward personal songwriting. Even when his sales declined in the '80s and '90s, Dylan's presence was calculable. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:3zhqoayabijm

The Rolling Stones



By the time the Rolling Stones began calling themselves the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the late '60s, they had already staked out an impressive claim on the title. As the self-consciously dangerous alternative to the bouncy Merseybeat of the Beatles in the British Invasion, the Stones had pioneered the gritty, hard-driving blues-based rock & roll that came to define hard rock. With his preening machismo and latent maliciousness, Mick Jagger became the prototypical rock frontman, tempering his macho showmanship with a detached, campy irony while Keith Richards and Brian Jones wrote the blueprint for sinewy, interlocking rhythm guitars. Backed by the strong yet subtly swinging rhythm section of bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts, the Stones became the breakout band of the British blues scene, eclipsing such contemporaries as the Animals and Them. Over the course of their career, the Stones never really abandoned blues, but as soon as they reached popularity in the U.K., they began experimenting musically, incorporating the British pop of contemporaries like the Beatles, Kinks, and Who into their sound. After a brief dalliance with psychedelia, the Stones re-emerged in the late '60s as a jaded, blues-soaked hard rock quintet. The Stones always flirted with the seedy side of rock & roll, but as the hippie dream began to break apart, they exposed and reveled in the new rock culture. It wasn't without difficulty, of course. Shortly after he was fired from the group, Jones was found dead in a swimming pool, while at a 1969 free concert at Altamont, a concertgoer was brutally killed during the Stones' show. But the Stones never stopped going. For the next 30 years, they continued to record and perform, and while their records weren't always blockbusters, they were never less than the most visible band of their era — certainly, none of their British peers continued to be as popular or productive as the Stones. And no band since has proven to have such a broad fan base or far-reaching popularity, and it is impossible to hear any of the groups that followed them without detecting some sort of influence, whether it was musical or aesthetic. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=1:THE|ROLLING|STONES

Led Zeppelin



Compared to their day, Zeppelin was the hardest there was. Zeppelin was metal before metal was even thought of. = lefty
Jimmy Page alone influenced almost every modern guitarist. = Mickey

Led Zeppelin was the definitive heavy metal band. It wasn't just their crushingly loud interpretation of the blues — it was how they incorporated mythology, mysticism, and a variety of other genres (most notably world music and British folk) — into their sound. Led Zeppelin had mystique. They rarely gave interviews, since the music press detested the band. Consequently, the only connection the audience had with the band was through the records and the concerts. More than any other band, Led Zeppelin established the concept of album-oriented rock, refusing to release popular songs from their albums as singles. In doing so, they established the dominant format for heavy metal, as well as the genre's actual sound. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4791CDA4EAF7020F3972C50CCA67DC000C846E8AE3F0F661BDFBA3C548E007EE35AD0B0C4FDFB77AB7BA9E02CA45A0A9FC9E456F4D6673F2DED93&uid=CAW010512261508&sql=11:99m8b5f4tsqh~T0

Jimi Hendrix



In his brief four-year reign as a superstar, Jimi Hendrix expanded the vocabulary of the electric rock guitar more than anyone before or since. Hendrix was a master at coaxing all manner of unforeseen sonics from his instrument, often with innovative amplification experiments that produced astral-quality feedback and roaring distortion. His frequent hurricane blasts of noise and dazzling showmanship — he could and would play behind his back and with his teeth and set his guitar on fire — has sometimes obscured his considerable gifts as a songwriter, singer, and master of a gamut of blues, R&B, and rock styles. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4791CDA4EAF7020F3972C50CCA67DC000C846E8AE3F0F661BDFBA3C548E007EE35AD0B0C4FDFB77AB7BA9E02CA45A0A9FC9E457FED667382DED93&uid=CAW010512261512&sql=11:pu08b594tsqh~T0

The Velvet Underground



Few rock groups can claim to have broken so much new territory, and maintain such consistent brilliance on record, as the Velvet Underground during their brief lifespan. It was the group's lot to be ahead of, or at least out of step with, their time. The mid- to late '60s was an era of explosive growth and experimentation in rock, but the Velvets' innovations — which blended the energy of rock with the sonic adventurism of the avant-garde, and introduced a new degree of social realism and sexual kinkiness into rock lyrics — were too abrasive for the mainstream to handle. During their time, the group experienced little commercial success; though they were hugely appreciated by a cult audience and some critics, the larger public treated them with indifference or, occasionally, scorn. The Velvets' music was too important to languish in obscurity, though; their cult only grew larger and larger in the years following their demise, and continued to mushroom through the years. By the 1980s, they were acknowledged not just as one of the most important rock bands of the '60s, but one of the best of all time, and one whose immense significance cannot be measured by their relatively modest sales. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4791CDA4EAF7020F3972C50CCA67DC000C846E8AE3F0F661BDFBA3C548E007EE35AD0B0C4FDFB77AB7BA9E02CA45A0A9FC9E457F8D6653E2DED93&uid=CAW010512261514&sql=11:57d3vw9va9lk~T0

Pink Floyd



Pink Floyd is the premier space rock band. Since the mid-'60s, their music relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special effects to push pop formats to their outer limits. At the same time they wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words. Despite their astral image, the group was brought down to earth in the 1980s by decidedly mundane power struggles over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very name. After that time, they were little more than a dinosaur act, capable of filling stadiums and topping the charts, but offering little more than a spectacular recreation of their most successful formulas. Their latter-day staleness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they were one of the most innovative groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4791CDA4EAF7020F3972C50CCA67DC000C846E8AE3F0F661BDFBA3C548E007EE35AD0B0C4FDFB77AB7BA9E02CA45A0A9FC9E457F9D666352DED93&searchlink=PINK|FLOYD&uid=CAW010512261515&samples=1&sql=11:gt7zef5khgf4~T0

The Grateful Dead



Rock's longest, strangest trip, the Grateful Dead were the psychedelic era's most beloved musical ambassadors as well as its most enduring survivors, spreading their message of peace, love, and mind-expansion across the globe throughout the better part of three decades. The object of adoration for popular music's most fervent and celebrated fan following — the Deadheads, their numbers and devotion legendary in their own right — they were the ultimate cult band, creating a self-styled universe all their own; for the better part of their career orbiting well outside of the mainstream, the Dead became superstars solely on their own terms, tie-dyed pied pipers whose epic, free-form live shows were rites of passage for an extended family of listeners who knew no cultural boundaries. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4791CDA4EAF7020F3972C50CCA67DC000C846E8AE3F0F661BDFBA3C548E007EE35AD0B0C4FDFB77AB7BA9E02CA45A0A9FC9E457F5D664382DED93&searchlink=GRATEFUL|DEAD&uid=MIW030512261519&samples=1&sql=11:q69us34ba3ng~T0

The Who



Few bands in the history of rock & roll were riddled with as many contradictions as the Who. All four members had wildly different personalities, as their notoriously intense live performances demonstrated. The group was a whirlwind of activity, as the wild Keith Moon fell over his drum kit and Pete Townshend leaped into the air with his guitar, spinning his right hand in exaggerated windmills. Vocalist Roger Daltrey strutted across the stage with a thuggish menace, as bassist John Entwistle stood silent, functioning as the eye of the hurricane. These divergent personalities frequently clashed, but these frictions also resulted in a decade's worth of remarkable music.
As one of the key figures of the British Invasion and the mod movement of the mid-'60s, the Who were a dynamic and undeniably powerful sonic force. They often sounded like they were exploding conventional rock and R&B structures with Townshend's furious guitar chords, Entwistle's hyperactive bass lines and Moon's vigorous, chaotic drumming. Unlike most rock bands, the Who based their rhythm on Townshend's guitar, letting Moon and Entwistle improvise wildly over his foundation, while Daltrey belted out his vocals. This was the sound the Who thrived on in concert, but on record they were a different proposition, as Townshend pushed the group toward new sonic territory. He soon became regarded as one of the finest British songwriters of his era, as songs like "The Kids Are Alright" and "My Generation" became teenage anthems, and his rock opera, Tommy, earned him respect from mainstream music critics. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4791CDA4EAF7020F3972C50CCA67DC000C846E8AE3F0F661BDFBA3C548E007EE35AD0B0C4FDFB77AB7BA7E02CA45A0A9FC9E452FCD666382DED93&uid=CAW030512281540&sql=11:6227gjyrj6ic~T0

Mark Hollis would be my first pick without a doubt. He did more interesting things with vocals and the electric guitar in one album than most people do in their whole careers.

i'd probably just put dylan in it and then you wouldn't really need anyone else.

beatles
beach boys
clash
chuck berry
little richard
hank williams, sr.

i think those names speak for themselves.

pearl jam














and creed

thats it

Emperor

First, the obvious:
The Beatles
Jimi Hendrix
Led Zeppelin
Black Sabbath
Bob Dylan
Pink Floyd
Johnny Cash
The Clash

Then, some others I think are deserving:
Tom Waits
The Stooges
The Sex Pistols
Pearl Jam
Nirvana
The Smashing Pumpkins
Soundgarden
Radiohead
Alice In Chains
Nine Inch Nails
Queen
The Cure
Joy Division

Some others I feel may be eligible in the future:
Queens of the Stone Age
Beck
The Flaming Lips
Neutral Milk Hotel
At The Drive-In
The Mars Volta
Deftones
The White Stripes
Godspeed You Black Emperor!

*cough* rolling stones *cough*

Yeah, I knew I'd get that. I just don't like them, and I don't think they impacted music nearly as much as any of the other bands on that list.

Oh yeah, and I forgot Ramones.

Chuck Berry
Buddy Holly
Phil Spector as a producer
The Beatles
The Beach Boys
The Byrds
Bob Dylan
The Band
The Yardbirds
The Who
Neil Young
The Grateful Dead
Led Zeppelin
Pink Floyd
The Velvet Underground
Aerosmith
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
AC/DC
R.E.M.
Bruce Springsteen
Pearl Jam
Soundgarden
Alice in Chains
Nirvana
The Smashing Pumpkins
Radiohead

I can't really agree to putting anything more recent on here. And I also can't seem to break from the notion that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should be the mainstream bands. Then again, the list I just made is pretty much all the mainstream bands (except for Velvet Underground) that I really liked. I didn't include bands like Jimi Hendrix or The Eagles or Fleetwood Mac because I'm not a fan of them. In some ways, a Hall of Fame, especially in the more recent years, would not even be a desirable thing to be in, in my opinion. The Hall of Fame of today might include bands like Default or Nickleback or 50 cent etc, etc. Nothing I would want to be a part of.

Ah, how did I forget?!

As much as I hate to admit it, they probably influenced more music than anyone on your list, with exceptions for The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin.

no one has said talking heads yet.

The Kinks


...anyone said chili peppers

ben harper

I protest Ben Harper and the Chili Peppers

Well, I disagree.

we should have a vote and add a new member(s) every month or so

In the actual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame don't they wait 25 years to induct an artist?

Anyway, maybe since this is going to be the RM Hall of Fame, we could make it the artists who influenced us individually the most. In that case, mine would be:

Aerosmith (Aerosmith - Big Ones was the first album I ever owned, my Dad got it for me)
Pink Floyd
The Grateful Dead
Pearl Jam
Alice in Chains
Mogwai

Nah. Just for being alive and playing as a band nowadays, the Rolling Stones should get into the hall of fame. I'd be willing to replace Pink Floyd/Johnny Cash if we're talking about being influential. I can't remember the last time I've listened to a band that has said they were influenced by Pink Floyd or Johnny Cash. Maybe Radiohead or something, but I don't know. Now don't get me wrong; those two are great bands. But if we're talking about influence, Rolling Stones ftw.

Are there any artists not in the rock and roll hall of fame who are eligble and should be?

Looking over people's lists I'd put pearl jam, the pumpkins, and nirvana in. I don't think I'd put in AIC and I defintiely think I would not put in soundgarden. They were a great band, but did they really influence music beyond being popular?

I'm not saying this to be arguementative. I'd be interested in hearing a hard sell on soundgarden