Do Hip Hop Artists Belong in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

In an interview with Radio.com, Kiss frontman and all around genius businessman Gene Simmons was speaking about the band’s upcoming induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While doing so, he happened to mention that he thinks the RRHoF is no place for rap, hip hop, and vocal artists, talented as those artists may be. While the crux of his point may have a bit of merit, the semantics of music, and rock and roll specifically, discredit that almost immediately.
One of the questions Simmons was asked during the interview was about Donna Summer “finally” being inducted into the Hall of Face, to which he replied: “What do you mean ‘finally?’ Donna was my next door neighbor for many years, I knew and liked her, she was on my [1978] solo record. But if you asked Donna, ‘What kind of artist are you?’ do you think she would say ‘rock?’ If you asked Madonna, ‘What kind of artist are you?’ do you think she would say, ‘Oh, rock!’ So what they hell are they doing in the Hall of Fame? They can run their organization any way they’d like, but it ain’t rock! It just isn’t! If you don’t play guitar and you don’t write your own songs, you don’t belong there.”
Given that rock music was born the bastard child of blues and country, incorporating elements of folk (which makes sense as country and folk are very close in lineage), jazz, and even classical music, from word go the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame didn’t really have a way to avoid so-called non-‘Rock’ artists. The earliest ‘rock’ artists, or rock stars, if you like, were very blues influenced musicians.
1986 was the inaugural year of RRHoF inductees: Does anyone happen to recall who those first inductees were? Led Zeppelin, perhaps? Cream? The Beatles? Nope. The class of 1986 was Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard. Simmons stated that ‘If you don’t play guitar and you don’t write your own songs, you don’t belong there,’ yet the first group of inductees, who were undeniably the forefathers of rock and roll and the artists who set the path followed by the likes of Simmons, et al, were hardly playing V-shaped guitars and wearing leather trousers.
While Simmons gave due credit to the talent of those artists in hip hop, he seems to have missed the larger point, genres simply don’t matter. Maybe no one is going to put Johnny Cash in the ‘Rock’ category of a record store or iTunes but he was more Rock and Roll than anyone in Megadeth will ever be. Perhaps the members of the Sugarhill Gang didn’t play guitars but they started a new musical revolution. We’ve only seen that kind of impact a few times in America. We saw it when Elvis shook his hips. We saw it when The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show. We saw it when Nirvana jumped up and down in a school gymnasium. Perhaps hip hop artists don’t have guitars, but neither did Jerry Lee Lewis, did Ray Charles, or Sam Cooke, yet they still revolutionized rock and roll forever. It’s music, it’s all music. We can’t pick and choose where delineations lie based on something as stupid as a genre. True talent will be remembered and get its due credit, regardless of its classification.