Nov 14, 20263 min read

Hall Doors Open Both Ways

Tonight three hip hop acts take permanent seats in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. From this page, the win belongs to the culture that never waited for permission.

OMYGOTTI

Toronto hip-hop artist | 730K+ Facebook

We Stopped Asking a Long Time Ago

There was a stretch of hip hop history where a night like this one would have been framed as the culture finally being accepted. Wu-Tang Clan entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as Performers tonight at the Peacock Theater, with Queen Latifah and MC Lyte taking Early Influence Awards on the same evening, would have been written up as rock opening its doors to rap at last. From where this page sits, that framing is backwards and a little insulting. Hip hop stopped asking for a seat at anybody table around the time it became the most consumed music on the planet. Tonight is not rap being let in. Tonight is the Hall catching up to where the culture already lives.

Look at the class the voters built. More than 1,200 ballots produced a performer group that runs from Phil Collins to Sade to Iron Maiden, and standing in the middle of it, on a first nomination, is a nine man crew from Staten Island housing projects who sold kung fu samples and street philosophy as high art. The Hall did not do the Clan a favor. A hall of fame without Wu-Tang in it would simply be an incomplete record of what music was, and the voters knew it.

The Women Were Never the Footnote

What this page wants to underline, before the clips and speeches take over the timeline, is the Early Influence pairing. Latifah and Lyte are not being honored as supporting characters in a story about men. Latifah built U.N.I.T.Y. into an anthem and a business. Lyte was trading verses as a teenager and became the first woman MC with a full solo album, then spent decades as the voice other artists hire when an event needs gravity. Their awards say the institution finally understands that hip hop history written without its women is fiction.

There is a Toronto angle this page always feels on nights like this. Our city grew up watching American institutions decide which rap counted as history, while our own legends built parallel canons with a fraction of the machinery. Every door that opens down there still matters up here, because the same argument, whose work is permanent and whose is disposable, plays out in every scene, including ours. Nights like tonight hand the next generation of our artists a receipt: the work can outlast the gatekeepers.

Honor the Dead, Then Get Back to Work

A word for the empty chairs. Ol Dirty Bastard has been gone since 2004, and his chaos, humor and genius are baked into every reason the Clan is being honored. Luther Vandross, entering as a Performer tonight, has been gone since 2005. Halls of fame are always partly memorials, and there is nothing wrong with letting tonight be sentimental for exactly as long as the ceremony runs. Raekwon releasing Game Changers three days before the induction, produced by STREETRUNNER and Tarik Azzouz, is the correct energy: celebrate by shipping new work, not only by polishing old trophies.

So from this page, the message to the culture is short. Take the photos, quote the speeches, argue about the order of the class like we always do. Then remember that nobody in that room tonight waited to be chosen before they started. The Clan pressed their own records. Latifah named herself royalty before any institution agreed. Lyte picked up a microphone when the booth was not built for her. The doors opened both ways tonight. Walk through them like you built the building.