Watching this week as meteorologists tracked Hurricane Milton’s trajectory across the Gulf of Mexico to central Florida felt like waiting for the apocalypse to arrive. John Morales, a weatherman in Miami, choked up live on-air Monday as he described how quickly the storm had strengthened. The implications for the millions of Americans living in the monstrous hurricane’s path (as well as Morales’s frustration with the millions of Americans who have refused to take the threat of climate change seriously) are evident in his faltering voice:
Milton would intensify from a Category 2 to a Category 5 hurricane on Monday (reigniting conversations among scientists about whether it was now necessary to add a Category 6 classification to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) before slamming into the Tampa Bay area as a Category 3 storm Wednesday night. Mercifully, despite so far claiming the lives of at least 26 people and leaving behind billions of dollars-worth in damage, Milton was not the “storm of the century” many feared thanks to a last-minute shift in its course that ended up sucking water out of Tampa Bay rather than surging water into it.
Milton is the second hurricane to strike Florida in as many weeks. Hurricane Helene made landfall a week earlier, and much of the debris from that storm had yet to be picked up by the time Milton arrived. Helene caused widespread damage as it moved inland toward the Appalachians, hitting western North Carolina especially hard. The area around Asheville—a small city nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains that one would assume would be immune to the effects of a hurricane—experienced torrential rain and catastrophic flooding. Hurricane Helene has resulted in at least 250 deaths, including 123 in North Carolina, where another 200 people still remain unaccounted for.
Yet leave it to Donald Trump to see in all this death and destruction an opportunity to exploit human suffering for political gain. Trump has spent much of the past two weeks propagating lies about the Biden administration’s response to the hurricanes. The Republican presidential nominee falsely stated that Biden was refusing to answer phone calls from Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp; that FEMA and Democratic North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper were deliberately neglecting predominantly Republican communities; that state and local leaders had overwhelmingly condemned the administration’s emergency response efforts (the opposite was true); that individuals who lost their homes are only being offered $750 in relief (victims can receive $750 in immediate relief and apply for tens of thousands of dollars to help with long-term expenses); that there were “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina; and that Kamala Harris “stole” disaster relief funds and used it to provide illegal immigrants with housing (a line that’s been echoed by Speaker Mike Johnson, House majority leader Steve Scalise, and JD Vance, who added a line about how FEMA was also giving “special treatment” to gay and trans people.)
Trump is not the only right-winger spreading these lies. Elon Musk, the proprietor of Twitter/X, has claimed that FEMA was confiscating relief supplies (they were doing no such thing and directing physical relief to voluntary agencies) and blocking roads leading to devastated areas (local officials had closed impassable roads), and that the FAA had closed down the airspace over western North Carolina (Pete Buttigieg set him right on that fib.) North Carolina Lt. Gov. and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark “Minisoldr” Robinson asserted nearly every aircraft in use in North Carolina was either privately owned or from out of state (the state’s National Guard commander directly refuted that) and intimated Florida rather than his own state’s agencies were busy rebuilding his state’s roads. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who represents a district in northern Georgia hit by Helene, posted on Twitter/X “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done” and has continued to double-down on her wackadoodle theory. Infowars’ Alex Jones stated Helene and Milton were government-engineered “weather weapons.”
And then there are all the lies that have been spread or amplified online. Some have claimed the federal government is “seeding” the atmosphere to increase rainfall. Others maintain FEMA will use the disaster to seize property and confiscate homes (typically to advance some sort of left-wing political agenda). White supremacist and Trump whisperer Laura Loomer has urged people to resist assistance from FEMA “as a matter of survival.” AI-generated photo-realistic images of suffering children and animals have proliferated on social media. (For more about online misinformation and claims that the storms were engineered, see “Right-Wing Influencers Claim ‘They’ Defeated Physics, Geoengineered Hurricane Milton” by Tess Owen for Wired
Misinformation always spreads in the wake of a natural disaster. I think it’s fair to say, however, that we shouldn’t expect it to be spread by elected officials serving the people affected by the disaster, the billionaire owner of one of today’s most powerful media platforms, and the Republican Party’s nominee for president. People are suffering. Donald Trump has exploited their suffering for political gain. It’s just more proof he’s not qualified to serve as president.
Why is Trump doing this? It’s possible he’s so far down the right-wing media rabbit hole that he has no grip on reality. That would also suggest he’s at the mercy of conspiracy theorists and nut jobs and untethered to cold hard facts. Maybe he just sees in this episode an opportunity to once again pit the immigrant community and those with the basic human decency to treat them compassionately against the aggrieved Forgotten American.
Trump may also fear that the hurricanes have provided the current Democratic administration with a chance to demonstrate its competence (particularly in two battleground states) which could in turn boost the prospects of his opponent in next month’s election, so he has resorted to portraying Biden’s response to the disaster as biased, incompetent, and inadequate. (That’s rich, by the way, coming from the guy who acquiesced to helping the victims of wildfires in predominantly-Democratic California only after he was told the victims lived in predominantly-Republican counties; altered a National Hurricane Center map in an attempt to validate a message he posted on social media in which he incorrectly described the path of Hurricane Dorian; withheld billions in aid from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria struck the island and killed thousands of people; diverted $155 million from FEMA to fund his deportation program; and botched his administration’s response to the national pandemic emergency. Additionally, Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, would break up and downsize NOAA [the federal agency tasked with monitoring the nation’s weather] and commercialize NOAA’s weather forecasting services.)
Or maybe Trump, to paraphrase Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) from The Dark Knight, is one of those men who just want to watch the world burn:
Or if that’s a stretch, maybe Trump is the villain who sees a bunch of people playing with matches, gleefully douses his surroundings in gasoline, and then dances through the flames and ashes as the good guys struggle to put out his inferno.
A few years ago, a trio of researchers in Europe outlined a new personality profile they named “Need for Chaos.” Need for Chaos individuals are people who feel the current social order has denied them the status they deserve and long to destabilize that social order on the assumption they possess the skills and disposition that will allow them to thrive in the resulting instability. I wasn’t convinced such a personality type actually existed; even though they had described Steve Bannon to a tee, it seemed the researchers had described an adolescent Hobbesian male fantasy that channeled broadly-drawn evil-doers found in dystopian fiction and comic books.
But now I’m not so sure. Maybe there are a bunch of people out there seething with so much resentment that, if they can’t tear the whole system down, would at least prefer living in a world of discredited institutions where every sort of official and moral authority had crumbled and might and cunning made right. Maybe there are Americans so frustrated with a system that is supposed to work to the benefit of people like themselves that they would rather melt that system down and embrace the chaos. Every man a king.
These Need for Chaos individuals regard Trump as their clown prince. There isn’t a branch of government, a federal agency, nor a democratic norm Trump wouldn’t take a sledgehammer to. As a reformer, he has the instincts of a wrecking ball. Even his ineptitude and idiocy are seen as a plus, as they signal Trump is less concerned with getting things right than in just mixing it up and raising hell, results be damned. Trump may be a disgrace, but more importantly, Trump disgraces everything he associates himself with, making him an agent of degeneration. Just the guy these Need for Chaos types would gravitate to.
The problem, however, is that Need for Chaos individuals aren’t regular voters. Why head to the polls on Election Day to choose between two major party candidates promising to uphold a political-economic system they despise? So Trump must plumb the depths and feed them chaos to bring these voters into his coalition, a critical task in a close election in which Trump has probably maxed out his support among likely voters. I don’t think it much matters if you think Trump does this consciously or if it just comes naturally to him. If someone advised him that his language was inflammatory and deceitful, that his actions were reckless and endangered others, that the people he’s surrounded himself with are jokers rather than dedicated public servants, Trump’s response would be a big “so what,” as it all serves his own ends.
Fortunately, the real-world consequences of Trump’s hurricane edition clown show appear to have had a limited effect on relief efforts. Aid is reaching those who need it, and so far, I haven’t seen reports of people impeding the work of emergency responders or resisting their offers of help. What Trump and his crew have done, however, is make the work of those tasked with communicating disaster-related information to the public more difficult. Rather than follow the lead of emergency management authorities and echo their messaging, Trump instead used the storms to sow mistrust in government, which helped amplify the misinformation disseminated by others and forced authorities to work that much harder to counter its spread. If this seems like déjà vu, it’s because Trump made a similar play during the pandemic and when he challenged the validity of the 2020 election, only with more serious consequences. So regard the events of last week as a test run; as journalist Tim Alberta wrote on social media a few days ago:
Trump has confirmed yet again this week that he is not serious about governing. Even as two hurricanes have laid waste to vast swaths of the American southeast, he’s concluded for the sake of his own ambitions that his clown show must go on. It’s a terrible sequel. By now it hardly needs repeating, but Americans of every political persuasion should make sure it bombs.
Signals and Noise
“Trump Upgrades His Con to Category 5” by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post
Democracy Watch
“How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”—Don Trump, during an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. (For his part, Hewitt did not push back against the comments.) The White House condemned Trump’s remarks for “echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists.”
During an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to say Don Trump lost the 2020 election also declined to condemn comments made by Trump’s son that Democrats tried to assassinate his father. In discussing the election, Johnson said, “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future,” and then said about Democrats’ rhetoric leading up to Trump’s assassination attempt, “We need everybody on all sides to turn the rhetoric down and let’s have a debate about the records of these candidates, not the rhetoric.”
Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration is threatening to prosecute television stations that air pro-choice advertisements. DeSantis is already investigating people who signed a petition to put abortion rights on Florida’s November ballot and is spending state money on anti-abortion messaging.
This Week in “Donald Trump is Losing His Marbles”
“The word ‘grocery,’ it’s a sort of simple word. But it sort of means, like, everything you eat. The stomach is speaking, it always does. And I have more complaints about that ― bacon, and things going up double, triple, quadruple.”—Trump, during a rally in Michigan
“Many countries, they do that, and then all of a sudden you hear that they’re leaving Milwaukee, or they’re leaving wherever they may be located. It’s very sad to see it… and it’s so simple. I mean, you know, this isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they wanted to land, or he gets the engines back. That was the first I realized. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming — cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle, boom. Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill them up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. I don’t know. I don’t know. Couldn’t fill up the eight circles. I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful. It was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person that did that was the best thing about… that level of that circle was great, but they couldn’t get people. So they used to have the press stand in those circles because they couldn’t get the people. Then I heard we lost. Oh, we lost. Now we’re never going to let that happen again, but we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been abused by our own politicians, really more than other countries.”—Trump during a forum in Detroit
During his interview with Hugh Hewitt, Trump said Harris wants to “feed people governmentally.”
This Week in “WTF is Wrong with JD Vance?”
During an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times, JD Vance repeatedly refused to answer a question about whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election. At one point, the exchange went like this:
Garcia-Navarro: Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?
Vance: And I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.
The 2024 Election: The Campaign Trail
Annie Nova and Rebecca Picciotto of CNBC wonder if the Harris campaign can capitalize on a booming American economy.
During an interview on The View, Kamala Harris said there was “not a thing” she would have done anything differently than Joe Biden. Such an obvious question, and she didn’t have a good answer for it.
A group of Muslim faith leaders has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, a potentially critical move as many Muslim voters (especially in Michigan) have been disappointed with the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
The International Association of Fire Fighters declined to endorse either presidential candidate, a move that took the Harris campaign by surprise.
Trump escalated his attacks on immigrants at a rally in Aurora, Colorado, a city he falsely claimed had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs. (The Republican mayor of Aurora pushed back against Trump’s comments.) He also made awful and false statements about immigrants in Reno, Nevada.
“The whole country will be like — you want to know the truth? It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.”—Trump, speaking to the Detroit Economic Council
Bob Woodward’s new book reports Trump as president sent COVID-19 testing equipment to Vladimir Putin for personal use and has secretly spoken with the Russian leader as many as seven times since leaving office.
Trump and the Republicans are betting big on anti-trans advertisements in an effort to win over female suburban voters.
Elon Musk spoke at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump falsely claimed on his social media account that he was endorsed by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. When asked about the post, Trump said, “I don’t know anything about it” and that “somebody put it up.”
According to Bob Woodward’s new book, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said Trump was “fascist to the core.”
Matt Novak of Gizmodo writes that scammers have flocked to Trump’s Truth Social social media platform and swindled users out of millions of dollars.
Trump’s campaign has encouraged small-money donors to contribute to his campaign with contests and sweepstakes, but (unsurprisingly) Karen Yourish and Lazaro Gamio of the New York Times found most of the contests appear to have no winners.
The Bibles Trump is selling? Made in China.
Jack Healy of the New York Times writes that Democratic canvassers in Arizona have reported their efforts to register Latino voters have been monitored by conservative activists.
More Americans are now registered as Republicans than Democrats, the first time the GOP has had a lead on this metric in thirty years.
Congress
Annie Karni of the New York Times writes about Arizona Republican Representative Eli Crane, who is spreading wild conspiracies about the assassination attempts against Trump (and has received little pushback from other Republicans.)
Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who represents the Tampa-St. Petersburg area in Florida, is demanding FEMA release additional funding to aid hurricane relief but voted against the bill keeping the government open just last month that included an additional $20 billion in FEMA funding.
Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee has drafted a proposal for how the Senate should be run should Republicans win a majority in the chamber this fall. His plan would decentralize power within the Republican caucus as it currently is in the Republican-controlled House, which has hardly worked out well for both Republicans and the country.
The Supreme Court
Joan Biskupic of CNN writes Chief Justice John Roberts has reportedly been “shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution.”
Public Policy
The Biden administration has set a 10-year deadline for replacing lead pipes in their water systems.
Fatima Hussein of PBS looked at government data and found that immigrants do not take jobs from Black or Latino workers.
International News
At least thirty people were killed in northern Gaza after Israel launched an attack against a refugee camp where Israel said Hamas was attempting to regroup.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa interviewed dozens of doctors in Gaza about what they have seen working there. Many reported seeing numerous children with single-shot head wounds, including an 18-month-old girl.
Top 5 Records Music Review: 38 Black Artists Who Belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony is less than a week away. This year’s inductees are Mary J. Blige, Cher, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Kool and the Gang, the Dave Matthews Band, Ozzy Osbourne, and A Tribe Called Quest, with Jimmy Buffett, the MC5, Dionne Warwick, and Norman Whitfield receiving the Musical Excellence Award; Alexis Korner, John Mayall, and Big Mama Thornton being honored as musical influences; and Suzanne de Passe being inducted as a non-performer. The ceremony will stream live on Disney+ on Saturday night.
Discussions about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame often revolve as much around who has been inducted as who has been snubbed. That conversation has been front and center this year due to Cher, who was finally inducted more than twenty-five years after she first became eligible. Cher is a pop culture icon whom many were astonished to learn was not yet in the RRHoF. Yet Cher’s catalog is also not very deep, and she’s rarely cited as a musical influence by other artists. Her exclusion seemed to some like a massive oversight; her inclusion to others seems undeserved.
When it comes to inducting artists, the RRHoF does have some blind spots. It hasn’t figured out what to do with influential underground/alternative groups and cult bands who never achieved popular success. Important British bands who never broke through with mainstream American audiences are often overlooked. Some artists are penalized for being too pop. Fans of genres like heavy metal and progressive rock often complain their favorite acts are overlooked. A vanishingly small number of inductees are women.
The RRHoF has also been criticized for a dearth of Black inductees. This is a complicated issue, however. It’s not my sense that the RRHoF is prejudiced against Black musicians. In its earliest years, when the Hall was focused on honoring acts from the 1950s and 1960s, Black artists actually represented a large proportion of inductees. To date, nearly every top tier Black artist eligible for the RRHoF has been inducted, and those who haven’t have either only been eligible for a relatively short period of time or fall into one of those aforementioned blind spots. It also isn’t as though the RRHoF has ignored lesser known Black artists either, as they have inducted acts like Solomon Burke, Lloyd Price, Bobby Womack, Darlene Love, and the Flamingos.
The issue instead is that when the RRHoF has gone back to play catch-up on artists from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they’ve overemphasized second-tier White artists like the Steve Miller Band, the Doobie Brothers, Journey, Bon Jovi, Stevie Nicks, Foreigner, and Peter Frampton, which has inflated the number of White musicians in the Hall. I’m not saying the RRHoF needs to rush out and induct a bunch of second-tier Black musicians (they’ve actually started doing some of that already; see Richie, Lionel) but that the RRHoF nomination process ought to be more deliberate so that the nomination committee is more aware of its blind spots, more conscious of the diverse genres they could draw nominees from, and less inclined to nominate flashy yet middle-of-the-road acts (most of whom happen to be White).
In an effort to help with that deliberative process, here’s a list of Black artists the RRHoF should consider for induction. I’ve grouped them by genre because I think it helps to think about artists in light of other similar acts that have been inducted and how artists contribute to artistic movements that occur within rock and roll, which helps prove their historical significance. I’m going to start in the 1970s because nearly every meritorious act from the 1950s and 1960s has been inducted.
1970s Pop, Soul, and Disco: The RRHoF has inducted a number of artists who left a lasting impression on the pop and R&B charts in the 1970s, but the Hall ought to dive deeper into the era. The O’Jays are already in, but another Philly soul group that deserves consideration is Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, whose ballads and proto-disco tracks are representative of the sound of Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records. The Blue Notes’ lead singer, Teddy Pendergrass, shouldn’t be overlooked either for his string of sultry solo recordings. The lush orchestrations of soul lothario Barry White paved the way to disco. And while they are most fondly remembered for their 80s post-disco hits, the versatile Pointer Sisters got their start in the 70s. But there are two artists from this category who stand out. The first is Diana Ross, who deserves to be inducted as a solo act for scoring hits throughout the decade. The second is Chic, an innovative disco band who influenced the careers of everyone from Madonna to Duran Duran. Chic has been nominated a record eleven times but is still on the outside of the RRHoF looking in. (Chic guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers received the musical excellence award in 2017 as a kind of consolation prize.) The RRHoF could correct this massive oversight, however, by enshrining the whole band.
Funk: The RRHoF has already honored 70s-era funk bands like Parliament-Funkadelic and Earth, Wind and Fire, but that’s about it, which is a shame since they’ve already dredged the 70s to honor nearly every White rock band from the era with a modicum of name recognition. Perhaps they’ll be more inclined to revisit this era now that they’re inducting Kool and the Gang, a 70s funk band that crossed-over to the pop charts in the 1980s. That could open the doors to Betty Davis (one of the decade’s boldest, most innovative, and influential artists); the Commodores (known equally for their hard-hitting funk and soaring balladry; this is where their lead singer, Lionel Richie, should have earned his spot in the Hall); the Ohio Players (a Dayton, Ohio, band known for their musicianship and hits like “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster”); and the Meters (a previously-nominated band that defined the eclectic, complex sound of New Orleans funk.)
Hardcore: The punk hardcore scene of the late 70s and early 80s was dominated by White male bands, but Washington DC’s Bad Brains—who began their career as a jazz fusion band—are considered one of the genre’s founding fathers. Bad Brains was nominated once before, but they remain a rather obscure band, which hurts their chances.
Golden Age Rap: To its credit, the RRHoF has been pretty deliberate in honoring the titans of rap music as they’ve become eligible. They haven’t really moved beyond rap’s marquee names, however. Eric B. and Rakim have been nominated before and were on last year’s ballot; the duo should be inducted for their lyrical craft and pioneering use of James Brown samples. Boogie Down Productions recorded intellectual, politically-minded rap albums. The vastly underrated Salt-N-Pepa was rap’s first successful female group and a major crossover act of the late 80s and early 90s.
90s Pop: The 1990s are not remembered as a pop decade, but a few stars do stand out. The most obvious is Mariah Carey, one of the decade’s highest-selling artists and its most influential vocalist. Carey was nominated this past year, so it seems her induction in the near future is inevitable. Although her career was cut tragically short by a plane crash in 2001, Aaliyah’s soft and subtle vocal style has influenced many of the past decade’s R&B singers. The chart-topping TLC also deserves consideration for their blend of R&B and hip-hop.
Gangsta Rap: Gangsta rap has lost some of its cultural cache recently, but it was still the most popular style of rap in the 1990s, and many of its most prominent practitioners (2Pac, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z) are already in. It might make more sense to induct Dr. Dre solo as a producer (he’s already in with N.W.A.) but the Hall might also consider recognizing Snoop Dogg, who broke through on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, for his distinctive drawl. Nas recorded Illmatic, which some consider to be the greatest rap album of all-time. Most today know Ice-T as an actor on Law and Order, but his hard-hitting albums from the late-80s and early-90s helped define the genre. Yet the gangsta rap group waiting at the front of the line for induction is Wu-Tang Clan, a beloved collective of rappers whose output constitutes its own hip-hop universe.
Electronica: While the RRHoF has honored synth-pop, they have yet to branch out into electronica, which Black American musicians played a crucial role in developing. Of particular note are Chicago’s Frankie Knuckles (known as the godfather of house music) and Detroit’s Bellville Three (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson) who pioneered techno. Another artist that should be inducted is the multiracial British group Massive Attack, which is credited with popularizing trip hop, a psychedelic blend of hip-hop and electronica that broke through in the 1990s and remains influential to this day.
Neo-Soul/Alternative Rap: Neo-soul and alternative rap had niche appeal in the 1990s, but the interrelated styles have exerted significant influence over the R&B and rap music produced over the past two decades. Neither style has a megawatt star on the level of the greatest gangsta rappers, but this year’s induction of A Tribe Called Quest suggests the RRHoF may be interested in recognizing the genre’s best acts. The nominating committee put Sade, a jazzy sophistipop outfit that foreshadowed the rise of neo-soul in the 1980s, on the ballot this year, so it seems they have a decent shot at induction in the near future. An alt-rap forerunner the Hall could honor is De La Soul, an eclectic hip-hop group that emerged in the late 1980s that stood in contrast to rap’s increasingly hardcore aesthetic. The RRHoF needs to figure out what to do with the Fugees and and the solo career of one of their members, Lauryn Hill; the Fugees’ The Score is a landmark alternative rap album, while Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is today regarded as one of the greatest albums of all-time, but that’s really the extent of both acts’ output. If the Hall wanted to honor the originator of neo-soul, they would nominate Meshell Ndegeocello, but it might make more sense to first recognize Erykah Badu, who is known as the Queen of Neo-Soul. Nor should the RRHoF overlook the Roots, the versatile rap band that straddles both genres and that has played on a number of the styles’ most important records.
Southern Rap: Most southern rap groups aren’t yet eligible for induction, but it’s shocking the genre’s most important and popular act—OutKast—hasn’t even been nominated yet. The duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000 received popular and critical acclaim in the late 90s and early 00s and played a major role in turning Atlanta into the center of the hip-hop world.
Non-Rock Groups: The RRHoF does not limit itself to inducting only rock and roll acts. In the past, they have honored artists outside rock and roll who have influenced the style or been heavily influenced by it. The recent inductions of Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson suggest the Hall is interested in recognizing country musicians, but the institution should not limit its non-rock inductions to representatives from a genre that is overwhelmingly White. To that end, just as the RRHoF has inducted jazz great Miles Davis for his pioneering fusion albums, the Hall should also consider Herbie Hancock, whose 1970s fusion records melded jazz with R&B and funk. Nigerian Fela Kuti, the driving force behind the development of Afrobeat in the 1970s, has been nominated before, but the powers-that-be at the RRHoF should streamline the international superstar’s induction via a musical excellence award. And while the Hall has welcomed in Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, there are other deserving Jamaican artists as well, including rudeboy Desmond Dekker, the reggae band Toots and the Maytalls, and dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry.