Hip-hop has always been about stacking paper. Yet despite having money on their mind, artists seem to have taken a while to adopt America’s favourite lucrative merchandising strategy: Disneyfication.
Thankfully, this oversight has been remedied this week, with news of a planned Hip-Hop Hall of Fame in Harlem. The $150m (£118m) complex, potentially somewhere near the legendary Apollo Theater, will one day offer the likes of Young Thug and Bubba Sparxxx the chance to be pickled in aspic and flogged as throw cushions in a gift shop.
And, as if the commercialisation of black American culture wasn’t having a good enough week, Jay Z will be the first rapper inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame at a ceremony in New York on Thursday. Jay Z was reported to be “over the moon” about his inclusion, taking it as vindication of his art form.
This is mystifying to us in Britain, where the concept of the hall of fame has never really taken hold. In 2004, Channel 4 did attempt to create a UK version – the UK Music Hall of Fame. More of a TV format than a physical space, after just three years it held its final outing in 2006, inducting Prince, who was “sorry he couldn’t be there in person”, and Rod Stewart, who was also “sorry he couldn’t be there”. James Brown did turn up – sadly it turned out to be his final performance.
Yet in the US, the founding of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was the subject of fierce bidding between rivals Cleveland and Memphis – the latter’s city authority poured in $65m (£51m) to clinch the bid. Founded in 1986, it has since inducted fistfuls of middle-American faves, among them John Mellencamp, Linda Ronstadt and Journey.
Yet it was far from the first. In fact the Country Music Hall of Fame had been going as far back as 1967. It now covers a 12,000 sq m site in downtown Nashville. For visitors, it must compete with the Musicians Hall of Fame, also in downtown Nashville. A confusing brief, themed not entirely around session men but also around “musicianship” more generally, it has inducted the Crickets, as well as Booker T and the MGs, Toto, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Keith Richards.
Booker T would also be a shoo-in for the Official Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame, invented by former Harlem Globetrotter LaMont Robinson. On Saturday, it inducted its most recent crop at a rambling four-hour show in Detroit featuring Gladys Knight.
Those with twangier tastes will have to wait until 2018 to visit the new Bluegrass Hall of Fame, in Owensboro, Kentucky, but if that’s too long, be comforted by the fact that music halls of fame proliferate throughout the US. Even the fifth least-populous state in the union – South Dakota – has one. Its 2016 intake included the likes of “Handy Bros Chessman Show, a late-60s racially integrated soul band from Sioux Falls” and “WhiteWing, an ethereal progressive rock band from Rapid City”.
Not everyone can be famous, but in the US, almost everyone can be in a hall of fame.
