The Last Page
Mills, Nicolaus
At the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, you don't, as you do at the Metropolitan Museum ofArt in New York, get a bright tin badge to wear once you have paid admission....
...But Cleveland campaigned to get the Rock Hall of Fame, helped fund it, and has made it one of the jewels in its downtown renaissance...
...I had expected to be a middle-aged outsider in a sea of teenagers...
...As we close out the century, nothing could be more timely than a museum that provides us with a record of this process and an opportunity to sort through where it is taking us...
...Instead, you get the back of your hand stamped, the way they do at high school dances...
...I. M. Pei's architecture, which takes advantage of the huge tract of lakefront on which the Hall of Fame rests, is in no small measure responsible for that...
...But it was an unusually happy crowd that milled about...
...Since the 1950s, rock—not poetry or film or the novel—has provided the Whitmanesque element in our culture...
...On the winter day that I went there, you couldn't just pay admission and walk in...
...There is no overwhelming reason for the Rock Hall of Fame, which opened last September, to be in Cleveland...
...The dual-triangular glass tent that covers the Hall of Fame entrance and extends into a sixty-five-thousand-square-foot plaza obliterates any sense of being crowded into a museum where you are expected to react with awe to what you are seeing...
...NICOLAUS MILLS q 128 • DISSENT...
...Pepper uniform, Madonna's Jean-Paul Gaultier bra, The Supremes' "butterfly" gowns are all on display, and those who come to the museum represent a similar mix...
...Memphis with Elvis, Detroit with Motown, Philadelphia with American Bandstand had as good a claim as Cleveland, where in the early 1950s radio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rock—mostly rhythm and blues—on his breakthrough "Moon Dog Show...
...But what is most striking about the Rock Hall of Fame isn't its liberating postmodern architecture or the rareness of its memorabilia but the way in which its crowds and exhibits defy the racial and generational schisms that define so much of American life in the nineties...
...There is a feeling of openness everywhere...
...If teenagers come to the Rock Hall of Fame to learn about the past and claim their musical inheritance, Baby Boomers arrive to confirm their past and see how much of it extends into the present...
...Nobody paying for a thirty-second commercial on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air expects to get the same audience that watches Seinfeld...
...From sitcoms to talk shows, prime-time programs are measured by whom they enable a sponsor to reach...
...it's a very different story at the Rock Hall of Fame...
...But the number of fortysomethings—black and white—at the Hall of Fame, on their own or with their children, eliminated that worry...
...These days there isn't a politician who doesn't know from polls how his or her message plays age, race, and class...
...It is the medium that has made the term crossover artist part of our vocabulary and created a context in which even British pop stars have wanted to sound black...
...It is a small gesture, but like the decision to have the Rock Hall of Fame guards dress in berets and black T-shirts, as if they were the security at a rock concert, it is a gesture that says much about the spirit of the place...
...There is a fairy tale quality to all of this...
...But it is a fairy tale based on a reality worth remembering...
...There was every reason for people to be angry with the delays...
...You had to wait in the lobby for an hour or more until the time your ticket allowed you into the exhibit halls...
...T-Bone Walker's guitar, John Lennon's Sgt...
...The same is true for television...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
