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4. Salt-N-Pepa: “None of Your Business”
In recent years, the Rock Hall has inducted quite a few hip-hop acts (most recently A Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliott and Eminem), and this year the influential trio Salt-N-Pepa will join the ranks. Enjoy this unapologetically brash single from the group’s 1993 smash “Very Necessary” — which earned them the first Grammy ever awarded to a female rap group.
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5. The White Stripes: “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”
The White Stripes’ 2001 breakout “White Blood Cells” opens with this blustery blast of bluesy garage rock, showcasing Jack White’s shambolic energy and the steady pummel of Meg White’s drumming. Though the White Stripes are being honored in their first year of eligibility — first-ballot Hall of Famers, as it were — they’re unlikely to reunite at the ceremony, since the contentedly elusive Meg has long since retired from performing.
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6. Bad Company: “Bad Company”
Though the Bad Company (and former Mott the Hoople) guitarist Mick Ralphs passed away on June 23, he lived long enough to learn that his band was finally set to be inducted into the Rock Hall this fall, after 26 years of eligibility. Ralphs was “elated,” according to the surviving band members, the drummer Simon Kirke and the frontman Paul Rodgers.
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7. Soundgarden: “Outshined”
With Soundgarden’s induction this year, three of the “big four” ’90s grunge bands will be in the Rock Hall. (Nirvana and Pearl Jam are in; maybe next year, Alice in Chains.) Helmed by Chris Cornell, one of rock’s mightiest voices, Soundgarden fused metal influences and undeniable melodicism to create its signature sound. Please enjoy this sludgy single from the band’s 1991 album, “Badmotorfinger,” chosen specifically for this playlist by the biggest Soundgarden fan I know, my dad.
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8. Outkast: “Aquemini”
Boundlessly imaginative, lyrically incisive and stylistically adventurous, Atlanta’s Outkast — the duo of André 3000 and Big Boi — helped take Southern hip-hop global in the mid-1990s and achieved enormous commercial success with the 2003 double album “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.” This title track from their great 1998 album “Aquemini” (that’s “an Aquarius and a Gemini”) is a testament to each rapper’s unique style and to their indissoluble bond: “Until they close the curtain, it’s him and I, Aquemini.”
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9. Warren Zevon: “Lawyers, Guns and Money”
Finally, here’s a guy who should have been inducted into the Rock Hall years ago: the droll musical poet Warren Zevon. Zevon’s friends and peers have done plenty lately to bolster his posthumous legacy (he died of mesothelioma in 2003 at 56). In 2023, Billy Joel wrote a letter to the Rock Hall nominating committee urging it to recognize Zevon, and just last month, artists including Jackson Browne and Shooter Jennings performed some of Zevon’s songs live at a star-studded tribute concert. But the strongest argument for Zevon’s induction is the work itself. As my colleague Jon Pareles put it in a great 2003 profile, Zevon had a knack for packing “a screenplay’s worth of incidents into a four-minute song.” This rightly beloved classic from his 1978 album, “Excitable Boy,” is a quintessential example of that approach.