Courtney Love pens essay calling for more women & Black artists in the Rock Hall

After calling out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for its lack of female inductees in a tweet last week, Courtney Love has written an essay further questioning why so few women and Black artists have been enshrined.

In the piece, published by The Guardian, Love reiterates that only about 8.5% of the Rock Hall’s inductees are women and wonders why it took the institution so long to honor female artists, including Nina Simone, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Tina Turner and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She also questions why it has continued to leave out women like Kate Bush and Chaka Khan, despite multiple nominations.

“The Rock Hall recognized Pearl Jam about four seconds after they became eligible,” Love writes. “And yet Chaka Khan, eligible since 2003, languishes with seven nominations.”

Bush is nominated again this year, as are Missy Elliott, Cyndi Lauper, Sheryl Crow, Meg White with The White Stripes and Gillian Gilbert with New Order.

“Meg White’s potential induction as one half of the White Stripes (in their first year of eligibility) has sparked openly contemptuous discourse online,” Love writes, referring to the Twitter firestorm about the drummer’s skills over the past week. “You sense that if voters could get Jack White in without her, they would do it today.”

Love adds that the Rock Hall’s induction record also “doesn’t look good for Black artists,” noting that Beastie Boys “were inducted … ahead of most of the Black hip-hop artists they learned to rhyme from,” such as the still-not-in A Tribe Called Quest.

“If so few women are being inducted into the Rock Hall, then the nominating committee is broken,” Love writes. “If so few Black artists, so few women of color, are being inducted, then the voting process needs to be overhauled.”