Uncommon talents

Anyone who remembers the hashtags #OscarsSoWhite and #WhiteOscars can attest that it was recently fashionable to accuse the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of being insensitive to “diversity.”

Curiously, the hashtags #RockHallSoWhite and #WhiteRockHall haven’t emerged with the 2016 induction of Cheap Trick, Chicago, Deep Purple, Steve Miller, and N.W.A. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

All male and—with the exception of N.W.A.—all white, the Class of 2016 is the Rock Hall’s least diverse list of honorees since Bob Marley and six other male acts were inducted in 1994.

Not that there’s anything wrong with diversity-blind decisions based on merit, especially when “diversity” means little more than one’s sex or skin color. But as such superficial details have achieved nearly talismanic status, any expression of common sense comes as a relief.

The long-overdue acknowledgment of the contributions of Cheap Trick, Chicago, Deep Purple, and Steve Miller to rock ’n’ roll is one such expression. And, their sex and skin color aside, they’re plenty diverse.

Chicago evolved from an experimental jazz-rock combo into a pop hit machine whose multiple songwriters and singers kept its music fresh for nearly two decades.

Steve Miller perfected a playfully futuristic blues-rock exemplified by his 1976 hit “Fly Like an Eagle,” a song that by the 1990s was being covered by performers as dissimilar as The Neville Brothers and CCM songstress Riki Michele.

Cheap Trick branded their hooky, hard-driving power pop with a visually iconic lineup: If the lead vocalist Robin Zander and the bassist Tom Petersson looked like central casting’s idea of ’70s rock stars, the drummer Bun E. Carlos and the guitarist Rick Nielsen were dead ringers for Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker and Huntz Hall in the Bowery Boys films respectively.

And Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice (five of eight Deep Purple members receiving Rock Hall honors) not only comprised a third of the British hard-rock triumvirate that included Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath but also came up with “Smoke on the Water,” a guitar riff rivaled only by that of The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” for instant recognizability.

As for N.W.A., it deserves induction too, but more for its impact than for its music. Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella got together in 1986, began coming apart in 1989, and broke up in 1991. During their five-year run, they transformed rap from an upbeat, mostly clean subcategory of R&B into the black equivalent of punk.

The group’s debut album Straight Outta Compton wasn’t the first rap long player to set egocentric, anti-authoritarian, inner-city hedonism to hard beats and vulgar rhymes, but it was the first of its kind to become an overground smash. As such, it turned the parental-warning sticker into an imprimatur that rappers would wear with pride.

Straight Outta Compton is also the title of the 2015 F. Gary Gray–directed N.W.A. biopic that was all but snubbed at the Academy Awards, thus giving rise to the #OscarsSoWhite and #WhiteOscars hashtags. It does the N.W.A. story justice, but it also deserves its R rating.

Those who want to avoid what that rating implies should watch Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd instead. White actors and all, it tells an eerily similar and equally cautionary tale.

And it didn’t win any Oscars either.