Courtney Love Slams Rock Hall’s ‘Sexist Gatekeeping’ in Scathing Op-Ed – Rolling Stone

Courtney Love is calling out the dearth of feminine artists within the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame — in addition to the dearth of girls on the establishment’s nomination board and voting physique — in a scathing new op-ed the Gap singer penned within the Guardian. “The Rock Corridor’s canon-making doesn’t simply reek of sexist gatekeeping, but in addition purposeful ignorance and hostility,” she wrote.

Love, herself now eligible for Rock Corridor consideration, famous that of the entire inductees, simply 8.48% are girls, whereas including that “the Rock Corridor voters, amongst them musicians and trade elites, are 90% male.”

“The nominations for this 12 months’s class, introduced final month, provided the annual reminder of simply how extraordinary a girl have to be to make it into the ol’ boys membership,” Love wrote. 

“Extra girls have been nominated in a single 12 months than at any time in its 40-year historical past. There have been the iconoclasts: Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Missy Elliott; two girls in era-defining bands: Meg White of the White Stripes and Gillian Gilbert of New Order; and a girl who subverted the boys membership: Sheryl Crow.”

Love put particular deal with Bush’s Rock Corridor credentials and the way the Rock Corridor neglected the one-of-a-kind artist for many years of eligibility earlier than lastly touchdown on the poll in 2018; 4 inductions later, Bush nonetheless hasn’t acquired the glory.

“By no means thoughts that she was the primary lady in pop historical past to have written each observe on a million-selling debut,” Love wrote of Bush. “A pioneer of synthesizers and music movies, she was found final 12 months by a brand new technology of followers when ‘Operating Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ featured within the Netflix hit Stranger Issues. She continues to be making albums. And but there isn’t a assure of her being a shoo-in this 12 months.”

Love additionally pinpointed different inexcusable Rock Corridor errors: “It took the Rock Corridor 30-plus years to induct Nina Simone and Carole King. Linda Ronstadt launched her debut in 1969 and have become the primary lady to headline stadiums, but she was inducted alongside Nirvana in 2014. Most egregiously, Tina Turner was inducted as a solo artist three a long time after making the grade alongside her abuser, Ike.”

Love additionally wrote that the uphill battle for feminine artists to be inducted is even more durable for Black artists like Chaka Khan, who has been eligible since 2003 and is extensively considered one of many biggest singers of all time.

“For all her distinctive expertise and accomplishments – and if there may be one factor girls in music have to be, it’s endlessly distinctive – Khan has not satisfied the Rock Corridor,” Love wrote. “Her credit, her Grammys, her longevity, her craft, her tenacity to outlive being a younger Black lady with a thoughts of her personal within the 70s music enterprise, the bridge to Shut the Door – none of it deserves canonization. Or so sayeth the Rock Corridor.”

Love added in conclusion, “If the Rock Corridor isn’t prepared to have a look at the methods it’s replicating the violence of structural racism and sexism that artists face within the music trade, if it can not correctly honor what visionary girls artists have created, innovated, revolutionized and contributed to widespread music – effectively, then let it go to hell in a purse.”