Cher, Mariah Carey, Sinead O’Connor, Oasis and Sade are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2024, which were revealed Saturday.
Other new names on the hall’s short list include Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Kool & the Gang and Lenny Kravitz. Also on the list are Dave Matthews Band, Mary J. Blige, Jane’s Addiction, A Tribe Called Quest and Eric B. & Rakim, each of whom has been nominated at least once before. Ozzy Osbourne, who is already part of the pantheon as a member of Black Sabbath, has gotten the nod as a solo artist for the first time.
“This remarkable list of nominees reflects the diverse artists and music that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame honors and celebrates,” John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, said in a statement. “Continuing in the true spirit of rock ’n’ roll, these artists have created their own sounds that have impacted generations and influenced countless others that have followed in their footsteps.”
The 15 cited artists are the first batch of nominees since the abrupt departure last year of Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone editor and co-founder of the Rock Hall, who had long held a powerful sway over the awards process.
In September, Wenner was ejected from the hall’s governing board just one day after the publication of an interview in The New York Times in which he justified the subjects for his interview collection “The Masters” — all of them white and male — with comments that were widely condemned as racist and misogynistic. Female artists like Joni Mitchell, he said, were not “philosophers of rock,” and Black performers like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye “just didn’t articulate at that level.”
It is also a little more than a year after Jon Landau, the former Rolling Stone critic who became Bruce Springsteen’s producer and manager, stepped down from his longtime perch as the chairman of the hall’s deliberately secretive nominating committee.
But this year’s selections largely continue a pattern that has been in place at the hall for much of the last decade — a mix of big-tent pop stars, Gen X and classic-rock icons, and a smattering of hip-hop and R&B performers. After years of pointed complaints about a dearth of women, some of the highest-wattage celebrity power is from female performers like Cher and Carey. It also includes a posthumous nomination for O’Connor, the uncompromising Irish singer-songwriter who died in July at the age of 56.
Not only is this the first nomination for Cher, but Sonny & Cher, the duo that first made her a star in the 1960s, has never been nominated either.
For fans of ’90s Britpop and sibling-drama fireworks, the nomination of Oasis offers the potential for a reunion of that band’s Liam and Noel Gallagher — the Mancunian brothers whose vicious public squabbles were once released as a 14-minute recording, and have never quite died down.
Inductees will be announced in April, and the 39th annual induction ceremony is set for this fall in Cleveland, the home of the Rock Hall’s museum. The nominations are voted on by more than 1,000 music historians, industry professionals and inducted artists. Artists become eligible for nomination 25 years after the release of their first recording.
