2026 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2026 inductess. They include Joy Division/New Order, Billy Idol, Phil Collins, Oasis, and others.

2025 Inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2025 inductees.

It's great to see Cyndi Lauper, Warren Zevon, and Joe Cocker take their place in the Hall among the greats!

2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2022 inductees! They include Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Pat Benatar, and Harry Belafonte.

Depeche Mode is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!

Depeche Mode has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame! Yay!

Also: It's about time!

I Would Code Anything for Love (but I Won't Code That)

Somebody clearly wants an Ig Nobel... Wow.

(Also, I am highly amused!)

Money quote from the programming language's GitHub page:

"Rockstar is a dynamically typed Turing-complete programming language.

Rockstar is designed for creating computer programs that are also song lyrics, and is heavily influenced by the lyrical conventions of 1980s hard rock and power ballads."

The Rockstar programming language, where power ballads = code https://t.co/l4sdSlV0BV pic.twitter.com/a7Fhm9zlf5

— Samuel Arbesman (@arbesman) July 23, 2018

Update (7/23/18): I wrote a blurb about Rockstar for the Improbable Research blog.

2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees

The 2018 inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame are Bon Jovi, The Cars (yay!), Dire Straits (yay!), The Moody Blues, and Nina Simone. Additionally, Sister Rosetta Tharpe received an award for early influence.

For the second year in a row, Depeche Mode was nominated but didn't get in. Maybe they'll make it next year?

Roxanne, Accelerated

This appeals to me for various reasons. :)

I am amused.

Sort of a fun lesson in compound interest, I guess. Roxanne by the Police, but every time they say "Roxanne" the song gets 5% faster :) https://t.co/oAUlEt2HDv

— Mike Lawler (@mikeandallie) December 12, 2017

(Tip of the cap to Card Colm Mulcahy.)

RIP Tom Petty (1950–2017)

After experiencing cardiac arrest earlier this morning, and amidst conflicting reports earlier in the day, it's now been confirmed—unfortunately but unsurprisingly—that Tom Petty has died at the age of 66. (This is consistent with the recent shelf life of rockers. :( )

I got the chance to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in concert for the first time just 11 days ago, and they were awesome!

You can read more about Petty from Wikipedia page. He has a lot of awesome songs, and here's a link to Learning to Fly as just one of them. Because of the music video for Don't Come Around Here No More, Petty will also always be my vision of The (Mad) Hatter. There are many other awesome songs to which I could also link.

Here is the CNN.com obituary, which includes some interesting tidbits that are not in the Billboard.com article above.

Not "Atomic Blondie"

I saw a billboard for the movie Atomic Blonde from my apartment building, and I was really excited that there was going to be a biopic about the band Blondie. So I looked up the IMDB entry, and the movie is in fact rather different.

This, by the way, was a very natural mistake to make. I hope that the song "Atomic" is in the film, at least.

An "Unsung" Collection of Songs

I love how words evolve: a collection of things that literally are sung are now "unsung" masterpieces, and it makes perfect sense.

Oh, what the bards of yore have wrought.

RIP Pete Burns (1959–2016)

Pete Burns, lead singer of the band Dead Or Alive, has died of cardiac arrest.

Years from now, if somebody does something that Pete Burns doesn't like, we will say that he would be spinning right 'round in his grave.

(Tip of the cap to Scott Porter.)

Nominations for 2017 Inductees to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!

There are some sweet nominations for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for the class of 2017 — including Depeche Mode and The Cars! (And especially including Depeche Mode!)

Update: The above link is to vote. It's on a website that will show different nominees in future years, so here is an article that will still show the 2017 nominees if you are looking at this blog post in the future. This year marks the first time that Depeche Mode has been one of the nominees.

Shot Through the Heart

I was grabbing a small dinner at Five Guys, and "You Give Love a Bad Name" (woo hoo!) started playing. I was the only person there who had already been born when that song came out, but that didn't stop some people in the place from rocking out a bit and singing along to it. It's a simple thing, but that makes me happy. (That's also a sure sign of a classic.)

Several years ago, by the way, there was a cool reference to it in a performance of the play Spamalot that I saw in Oxford. It was in a modified version of a Knights Who Say "Ni!" scene.

"Why Classic Rock Isn't What It Used To Be"

Fivethirtyeight.com has an interesting analysis of regional variations in classic rock, and how more contemporary songs have snuck into it (in some regions more than others).

One could also do a similar analysis of others "genres" (or "radio formats", if you prefer), such as adult contemporary. I remember being surprised (many years ago now) the first time I heard Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" on an adult contemporary station.

RIP Animal (1950–2016)

With rock legend David Bowie and other prominent rockers (like Glenn Frey, who was a founding member of the Eagles, and several others) dying in their late 60s (or sometimes early 70s) the last couple of weeks, January 2016 really feels like "The Month the Music Died" (especially with rock music), this article about Animal dying at age 66 is a parody that somebody had to write.

For music, this has been a really awful month...

(Tip of the cap to Chris Howland.)