Courtney Love accuses R&R Hall of Fame of misogyny: “They immediately recognized Pearl Jam”

In a lenghty op-ed published by The Guardian, Courtney Love called out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for discriminating against female musicians. To prove her point, Love also cited Pearl Jam’s 2017 induction into the R&R Hall of Fame.

“Why are women so marginalised by the Rock Hall?”, Love wrote. “Of the 31 people on the nominating board, just nine are women. According to the music historian Evelyn McDonnell, the Rock Hall voters, among them musicians and industry elites, are 90% male.”

She went on: “You can write the Rock Hall off as a “boomer tomb” and argue that it is building a totem to its own irrelevance. Why should we care who is in and who is not? But as scornful as its inductions have been, the Rock Hall is a bulwark against erasure, which every female artist faces whether they long for the honour or want to spit on it.”

Then she added, sarcastically: “The bar is demonstrably lower for men to hop over (or slither under). The Rock Hall recognised Pearl Jam about four seconds after they became eligible – and yet Chaka Khan, eligible since 2003, languishes with seven nominations. All is not lost, though – the Rock Hall is doing a special programme for Women’s History Month on her stagewear…”

She concluded by saying: “If the Rock Hall is not willing to look at the ways it is replicating the violence of structural racism and sexism that artists face in the music industry, if it cannot properly honour what visionary women artists have created, innovated, revolutionised and contributed to popular music – well, then let it go to hell in a handbag.”