toddle along

I was listening to a group gripe on the Slate Culture Gabfest which by the way I have listened to every week for possibly ten years now and it has really informed my worldview* and they were griping about the terminology/underpinnings of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and apparently Todd is going to be inducted along with Tina Turner, the Go-Gos (I bet the Bangles are really pissed off) and Carole King, and Todd was not dismissed exactly but categorised as 'rock of course' the implication that this was one of the old school people who you'd expect to have been inducted any year.

I don't feel dudgeon or anything on his behalf and I am sure he can take care of himself but he is a lot more iconoclastic than 'rock' and I'm pretty sure that anyone who categorised TR as 'rock' just doesn't really know/care what he does. Certainly he has committed many crimes in the realm of rock the most heinous of which in my book is producing Bat out of Hell though the one thing I will say in his defence there is that apparently he thought the whole thing was a Springsteen parody. Since I don't 'get' Springsteen I suppose it makes sense that I don't therefore 'get' Meat Loaf except insofar as that record makes me feel about as queasy as real meatloaf. Anyway - TR's actual output tends not to be rock, is my point, or at least it's at least as often other styles and genres (most of the time in the last ten years he's been putting out dance records, of some variety) and hearing him described/dismissed as 'rock' makes me want to pull out a bunch of his less rock records and not only that but also to play them while I make corrections to an article I first wrote about a decade ago and which possibly might even just see the light of day next year. A nation exhales lol. 

*Fascinated to hear them not pronounce ABBA the way most Americans often seem to, with the a sounds as in Java or guava or lava but to rhyme with the 'abbas' in yabba dabba doo. I had a feeling there might have been a chat beforehand just to get everyone on track there and that they went through a few minutes of getting the members' names right, too, which they didn't really, not that I could do better.