It's as regular as spring: Whenever the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame holds its annual ceremony, there are always a few tunnelvisioners who complain about certain inductees not being "rock and roll" enough. Last year, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five came in for abuse; this year, it's Madonna (although even the most culturally conservative classic rockers should have liked Iggy and the Stooges' makeover of Madonna's "Burnin' Up").
I'm old enough to have remembered AM radio being a melting pot where R & B, rock, pop and crossover country were all accepted equally. Of course, that all ended around 1978-79 when idiots like then-Chicago DJ Steve Dahl made a big show of publicly destroying disco records. And, with the end of disco in 1980, the fragmentation-for-ratings of popular music began in earnest.
And of course, there was the "he may write lyrics that people like, but he's boring" shellacking that Hall inductee Leonard Cohen received on THE HOWARD STERN SHOW yesterday from Howard, Robin Quivers, and Fred Norris (who has some knowledge of rock history and should have known better--regardless of whether he liked Cohen or not).
At this point, when the Stern show is going into its final three years, one wonders if perhaps Stern himself is a closet fan of Cohen and is doing Steve Dahl-type schtick along the lines of "I'm rich but I'm still down with the proles."
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