The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Really?

I was going through the various websites from which I get my news this morning and saw an interesting footnote, apparently Neil Diamond and Alice Cooper will be inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. Whist I mentally envisioned some ultra mellow uptempo performances of "Feed My Frankenstein" and "Hey Stupid" and metal versions of "Sweet Caroline" and "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" I asked myself the big question. Do I care? Sadly the answer was a resounding "meh."
I grew up in the period BEFORE completely formatted radio. It was not uncommon to hear several different types of music on one station. You could literally go from Issac Hayes "Shaft" to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Suffice it to say "I Love Rock and Roll" is more than just the title of a Joan Jett and the Blackhearts song, it's a way of life. If you look at the history of Rock and Roll in the early 50s, it was hated for it's primal almost sexual beats and lyrics which if not blatantly sexual were ripe with double entendre. In it's infancy it's audience was young and black and gradually became white teens and at that point it's harshest critics labeled it "devil music", "Jungle music" and just plain "nigger music" which had to be kept away from white teens at all costs.
In some parts of the south there were protests and in and in some cases riots against rock and roll as some communist plot whose ultimate goal was the corruption of American culture by getting white youth to mix with Negroes. Simply listening to rock and roll was a form of rebellion the likes of which upset a middle America who wanted all kids to grow up to be like Perry Como, Dorris Day and Pat Boone.
Big Joe Turner, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were the last people middle class white America wished for their children to emulate. With each successive generation the voices of dissent against Rock and Roll seemed to change but they always seemed to say the same things. Those who hated Elvis Presley's gyrating hips in 1954 sounded eerily similar to those who loathed Jimmi Hendrix's Afro in the 60's and Robert Plant's flowing locks in the 70s.

Rock and Roll has long been the music of non conformity and rebellion, what sense then does it make for the anthems of non conformity and rebellion (and their authors) to be enshrined in a "hall of fame"? On the contrary, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems to be the ANTITHESIS of EVERYTHING Rock and Roll has ever represented.
When Jerry Lee Lewis was learning to play piano and eventually setting them on fire I'm relatively sure the thought of someday being a bronze bust sitting next to a similar statuette of J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. When Bo Diddly learned his first chord he was not thinking of being accepted as "popular" music and when James Marshall Hendrix first took the stage fusing blues guitar back into rock and roll his thought was NOT to transform the way a generation would listen to music.

Neil Diamond and Alice Cooper said neither of them were sitting back awaiting the call from Cleveland to inform them of their induction into something they've achieved long ago. Both men earned the respect and accolades that made them both legends and to that end being given a bust in some hall somewhere next to a television playing a loop of their music seems a pointless honor. The REAL Rock and Roll Hall of fame exist where ever lovers of music congregate. It exist in music stores all over the planet where people buy the music that great artist produced as recently as last week and as long ago as several decades. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exists online whenever someone downloads a song or a video of an artist whom they've never heard of and is mesmerized by it.
But most of all the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exist where ever someone is holding a pair of drumsticks, a horn, bass or guitar and is desperately attempting to learn the chords of a song they simply can't get out of their heads. Rock and Roll like ALL great music can not be confined. Just as Beethoven and Mozart didn't need a "Hall of Fame" neither do Hendrix and Slash.