5 Feet of Fury

The 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees Are a Disgrace to Music

CLEVELAND, OH - SEPTEMBER 1: Streamers fill the sky over the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum 01 September after the opening ceremony. Between 20,000 and 30,000 people attended the ceremonies and parade that accompanied the opening of the museum designed by I.M. Pei. AFP PHOTO (Photo credit should read KIMBERLY BARTH/AFP/Getty Images)

Tim Sommer writes:

Remember that moment in the flat yellow hallway of your suburban high school when it seemed like the future would never come, when it seemed that your lips would never find a kiss, when you would stare at your reflection in the giant window panes by the gym and you would see exactly the moon-shaped, un-kissable face you assumed everyone else saw?

Then you heard the Kinks, or you heard the Mumps, or you heard Mott the Hoople, or you heard the tube-heated tones of a late-night DJ playing “Dark Star”, and you knew that behind the gamelan clangs of the blue green lockers, outside of the tall red brick walls, past that row of shrieking buses, beyond the anonymous whirr of the Long Island Expressway, somewhere beyond Bayside and Little Neck and even Jamaica, there might be a place where misfits like you would find love.

Rock ’n roll loved me before anyone else did, didn’t it love you before anyone else did, too?

That’s why it’s important to tell its story in the right way.