RRHOF 2024: Feels Like The Last Time

Foreigner's ballot presence highlights the dwindling presence of rock superstars among the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees.

Lenny Kravitz, one of fifteen artists nominated for induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2024, once sang "Rock & Roll is Dead" and looking at his list of fellow Rock Hall candidates, it's easy to think he was a stopped clock waiting for his moment to come around.

There are rockers among these fifteen nominees—I count half, over half of the ballot—yet there's this nagging sense that almost all of the honored acts are retreads in some fashion. Ozzy Osborne entered the Hall eighteen years ago as a member of Black Sabbath, Peter Frampton joked "Wait, you mean I'm not already in the Rockhall" upon learning the news. Dave Matthews Band and Jane's Addiction both were nominated in previous years, while Lenny Kravitz and Oasis unabashedly trade upon rock's storied past. Only Sinead O'Connor could be called a provocateur and it's hard not to shake the notion she only made it to the ballot due to her untimely passing last July.

That leaves Foreigner, who called an album called Agent Provocateur but studiously spent their career avoiding controversy. For a few years, Foreigner cruised down the middle of the road, not so much setting the pace as keeping up with the lead cars. Save their debut, where founding members Mick Jones and Ian McDonald—survivors of Spooky Tooth and King Crimson, respectively—established the group's glossy arena rock, the band always received an assist from notable co-producers: Keith Olsen, a veteran of Fleetwood Mac, polished Double Vision, while Roy Thomas Baker—who helped shape Queen's bombastic pomp-rock—gave Head Games heft. Those collaborators molded Foreigner to fit the contours of album rock radio, a process that continued after McDonald's departure. Robert "Mutt" Lange gave 4 a sleek sheen, taming the group's inherent macho bravado for soft rock airwaves. The secret ingredient on 4 was Thomas Dolby, the synth-pop pioneer who gave "Waiting for a Girl Like You" and "Urgent" atmosphere and texture. With the assistance of Alex Sadkin—a producer on Grace Jones' Nightclubbing and Duran Duran's Seven and the Ragged Tiger—Jones continued in this direction with Agent Provocateur and its neo-gospel smash "I Want to Know What Love Is," making Foreigner one of the few acts of the late '70s to seamlessly transition to MTV. 

Those are savvy commercial instincts, resulting in several records that do capture the overblown excess of their era. Maybe that's enough to warrant induction, provided that your criteria for induction is that the Rock Hall should preserve the best examples of different pop phenomena as if it were a natural history museum. Judged by other measures, such as influence and multi-generational appeal, Foreigner falls short: as the avatars of corporate rock, they're destined to be tied to their times.

That doesn't mean Foreigner has been inactive since the late 1980s, which is the last time they graced the Billboard Top Ten. The hits vanished when singer Lou Gramm—whose solo 1987 hit "Midnight Blue" is the equal of any of Foreigner's big hits—split in the early 1990s, setting Foreigner down a path that led to the group touring without a single founding member for over a decade. Health problems forced Mick Jones to stay at home starting in the early 2010s, leaving the band anchored by bassist Jeff Pilson and vocalist Kelly Hansen. They've been with the group for twenty years but are not slated for induction into the Rock Hall if Foreigner somehow gets enough votes to garner a nod. They may be onstage but they're not famous.

By and large, such distinctions don't matter that much: the average listener probably can't name every member of Chicago or the Moody Blues, either. Nevertheless, Foreigner appearing on the ballot over the host of acts from the punk or alt-rock fringes underscores how rock & roll has a diminished presence at the Rock Hall: they've depleted the reservoir of uninducted classic rock artists, so if they're looking for starpower, they need to double-dip (a'la Ozzy) or start to depend on such celebrities as Cher and Mariah Carey, whose genre designations are mere niceties: they're simply superstars. There are plenty of worthy, influential—and recognizable—rock artists still waiting for induction but ones that could be called superstars are vanishingly small.