Jay-Z wanted Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to be called Hip Hop Hall of Fame

If Jay-Z had his way, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame would have been renamed the Hip Hop Hall of Fame.

RRHOF Chairman John Sykes shared a story with Vulture recalling the time Hov made a request that the hall be named to reflect the popularity and impact of hip-hop as a genre.

“He told me, ‘Rock is dead. It should be called the Hip Hop Hall of Fame.’ And I said, ‘Well, Hip Hop is rock and roll,'” Sykes remembered. “He goes, ‘No, it isn’t.’ And I said, ‘We’ve got to do a better job explaining it. Little Richard, Otis Redding, Chuck Berry — these artists were the cornerstones of rock and roll. If you look at the sounds over the years, those artists ended up influencing Hip Hop.’”

Though he says “Jay-Z hemmed and hawed” about the title, he eventually “showed up to the ceremony” to be inducted into the RRHOF in 2021. “That made me feel like we had done our job to communicate that rock and roll is open to all,” Sykes said.

He argued that people’s request to drop the “Rock & Roll” from the RRHOF simply stems from not fully understanding the phrase’s meaning.

“If you go back to the original sound in the ’50s, it was everything. As Missy Elliot calls it, it was a gumbo. It just became known as rock and roll,” Sykes explained. “So when I hear people say, ‘You should just change it to the Music Hall of Fame,’ rock and roll has pretty much covered all of that territory. Rather than throwing the name out, it’s doing a better job of communicating to people where rock and roll came from and what it’s truly about. Once they hear it that way, they understand.”

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