There are still numerous hard rock and heavy metal bands that haven’t found their way to the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy, Eddie Money, Styx, Boston, MC5, REO Speedwagon and Jethro Tull are among the numerous artists yet to be recognized by the Cleveland institution.
Perhaps most glaringly getting the cold shoulder, however, is Foreigner. The band has sold more than 80 million albums worldwide and has numerous rock hits including “Cold As Ice”, “Double Vision”, “Hot Blooded”, “I Want To Know What Love Is”, “Juke Box Hero” and “Urgent”, among several others.
Recently, in a new interview with Houston Press, current Foreigner singer Kelly Hansen talked about the band’s exclusion, which he finds as baffling as everyone else.
“As an entity, I find it unusual that a group of people can have an arbitrary standard from which they decide who is in this substantial sounding-titled Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame,” he said.
“They cite as one of their criteria as ‘influence.’ Well, how many people have picked up a guitar and tried to learn ‘Cold As Ice’ or ‘Hot Blooded’? Or sing ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ in a karaoke bar? This band has sold 80 million-plus records. And that’s real records, not streams or downloads. That is the definition of influence.”
Last year, original Foreigner singer Lou Gramm talked about the snub, which he feels in personal.
“I think it’s less about whether we’re qualified, and I think it might be more personal now,” Gramm said.
“I know that at some point when a lot of our compatriots were being nominated and accepted into it, the bands and the artists that came up when we came up that were inducted into the Rock Hall Of Fame and we were left out, I believe that our manager at that time and Mick went to see the head of the Rock Hall Of Fame and had a discussion with him which led to some heated words. And as that discussion ended — I don’t know who; it might have been Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone magazine, who actually was a very good friend of Mick’s, I think he told Mick and our manager that it’ll be a cold day in hell before Foreigner gets in the Rock Hall Of Fame. That’s the way it ended up. And sure enough, I bet you 20 years has gone by since that.”
Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson previously said he didn’t care if the band got into the institution.
“I don’t want to be in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame,” Dickinson said. “Because we’re not dead yet.”
“Some people feel almost actively threatened by metal. Not by the nature of the music. But by the fact that it doesn’t conform to their worldview of what pop music should be, which is: pop music is disposable, darling. Well, we don’t make disposable pop music.”
This year’s Rock Hall class arguably includes just one artist under the rock/metal umbrella — Rage Against The Machine. The other artists going in are: Willie Nelson, Missy Elliott, Kate Bush, George Michael, Sheryl Crow and The Spinners.
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