The Brit nominees, who also include Eurythmics, have been selected alongside a host of American artists including Eminem, Dolly Parton, and Lionel Richie.
Kate Bush is one of three British acts nominated for entry to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year
This year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees have been announced, with Beck, Duran Duran, Eminem, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon and A Tribe Called Quest all making first appearances as potential inductees.
These seven join ten additional artists who have been nominated in the last few years but have been re-balloted (i.e. they lost out and weren’t seleceted). These are: Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Devo, Eurythmics, Judas Priest, Fela Kuti, MC5, the New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine and Dionne Warwick. Between five and seven will be sworn in to the Hall.
The results will be revealed at a ceremony in May, with another announcement on that further down the line. So how does one qualify for the prestige? Well, among the seven first-time nominees, Eminem is the only one landing a nomination in his first year of eligibility. Performers become eligible 25 years after their first commercial recording, and Eminem’s debut album, Infinite, came out in late 1996 (although not many fans own a copy, since it was an LP and cassette the aspiring rapper sold out of the back of his car, prior to joining Interscope).
Parton is the first-timer who had to wait the longest to get a nomination; her first recordings came out in the early ’60s, so the country-pop superstar has been eligible since the late 1980s.
Which all strikes me as quite unfair. Surely Eminem’s qualification has rustled a few feathers among musicians, who hadn’t expected their time to come for decades yet. Surely Pete Doherty was flogging recordings in primary school in exchange for sugar hits from sherberts. Why can’t that count?
