Wu-Tang Enters the Rock Hall Tonight

The 41st induction ceremony tapes tonight at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, and hip hop holds three of the most important seats in the room.

OMYGOTTI

Toronto hip-hop artist | 730K+ Facebook

A First Ballot Coronation for the Clan

Tonight the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tapes its 41st induction ceremony at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, and the headlining story for this culture is simple. Wu-Tang Clan enters the Hall in the Performer category, on the first nomination of the group eligibility run, beside Phil Collins, Billy Idol, Iron Maiden, Joy Division and New Order, Oasis, Sade and the late Luther Vandross. The class was announced back on April 13 and chosen by more than 1,200 voters from across the music business, and tonight is the night the votes turn into a room, a stage and a permanent plaque.

The case was never really in doubt. The Staten Island collective arrived in 1993 with Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), a record that rebuilt East Coast rap around dusty loops, kung fu dialogue and nine distinct voices trading verses like a cipher that never closed. From that one album came a solo empire, a clothing line, a business model where every member could sign his own deal, and a logo that still moves product three decades later. RZA said in April that he expected a full complement of members in the room, and everything about this week, including Raekwon dropping his Game Changers single on November 11, has pointed toward the Clan showing up whole.

Latifah and Lyte Get Early Influence Honors

The Performer category is only half of the hip hop story tonight. Queen Latifah and MC Lyte receive Early Influence Awards, the category the Hall uses for artists whose work bent the direction of the music before the mainstream was ready to measure it. Latifah, out of Newark, carried herself as royalty from her 1989 debut forward and turned that stance into acting, producing and a housing documentary that premieres on BET on November 27. Lyte, out of Brooklyn, was the first woman MC to release a full solo album, and her pen set a standard that every woman behind a microphone still gets measured against, fairly or not.

Putting the two of them in this class beside the Clan matters. It says the Hall is not only honoring the group that built an empire, it is honoring the women who proved a woman could headline the marquee in the first place. Fela Kuti, Celia Cruz and Gram Parsons round out the Early Influence honors, which makes this one of the widest ranging classes the institution has ever seated in a single night.

The Absences Tell Their Own Story

Not everybody in the class will be in the building. Reporting this week says Sade, Oasis and Iron Maiden will not attend the ceremony, and the Hall has not published a full attendance list, so some seats will be filled by presenters and tribute performers instead of the inductees themselves. Two members of the class are honored after death. Luther Vandross, who died in 2005, enters as a Performer, and the Clan carries the memory of Ol Dirty Bastard, who died in 2004 at 35 and whose absence has shaped every Wu-Tang reunion since.

That mix of presence and absence is honestly fitting for this class. Rock history is full of artists who never got to hear the applause, and a ceremony that tapes tonight for a December broadcast has room to hold both the celebration and the quiet parts at once.

How Tonight Reaches the Rest of Us

The ceremony is recorded rather than aired live on television. One Los Angeles report points to a livestream on the Hall YouTube channel tonight starting around 7:10 p.m., while the edited special is set for ABC on December 8 with streaming on Disney+ the following day, December 9. Either way, the speeches, the performances and the inevitable Wu-Tang group moment will be clipped and circulating within hours, because that is how every Hall night reaches the culture now.

For Toronto and everywhere else watching from home, the takeaway is bigger than one night in Los Angeles. A rap group from Staten Island, a queen from Newark and a lyricist from Brooklyn are now permanently seated in the same hall as the biggest names rock ever produced. The doors did not open by accident. Thirty years of records forced them open.

Keep Reading

Hall Doors Open Both Ways

Today in Viral Internet: November 14

Today in Hip Hop: November 13