Missy Elliot, George Michael, and Kate Bush were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame today, alongside other musical powerhouses like Willie Nelson, Chaka Khan, and The Spinners.
This makes Elliot the first female hip hop artist to ever be inducted – it’s about time! The “Get Your Freak On” rapper is a fierce performer whose talents also landed her in the Songwriters Hall Of Fame.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame praised Elliot for helping to open doors for women in the industry, “Elliott forged new paths for women in the music industry and society at large through her behind-the-scenes mastery and unapologetic ownership of her body, her sexual desires, and her Blackness in her music.”
George Michael is most well known as the frontman for Wham!, which had huge successes with “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” and “White Christmas,” but he also had a successful solo career. His second solo album, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 was about his struggle with being a closeted gay man during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
He bravely came out in 1998 and from then on lived his life out and proud until his death in 2016. Michael told The Guardian in 2005, “Gay people in the media are doing what makes straight people comfortable, and automatically my response to that is to say I’m a dirty filthy fucker and if you can’t deal with it, you can’t deal with it.”
Michael’s willingness to put his career on the line by living as an out gay man paved the way for LGBTQ+ artists today like Little Nas X and Sam Smith who are able to be open and honest about their sexuality.
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Beloved-by-the-gays icon Kate Bush is a radically experimental singer-songwriter who rose to fame in 1985 with the album Hounds of Love. The hit song from that album, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” had a resurgence last year after being featured in the fourth season of Stranger Things and then making the rounds on TIkTok.
Bush’s campy videography and status as an outsider is what has always drawn queer folks to her work, but her song “Kashka From Baghdad” from her 1978 album Lionheart really cemented her role as a gay icon. The song is about a woman watching a gay couple who can only come out at night so as not to be persecuted – which is wild considering it was written in the ‘70s.
But if you thought that was pushing the envelope for the times, in that same album she also has a song titled “Wow” which is about anal sex. In it, she sings about an actor who wants to be a movie star, but he’s “too busy hitting the Vaseline.” When she sings this line in the music video she pats her butt just to make sure nobody mistook her meaning. And of course, it was censored by the BBC.
Congrats on the newest members!
In 2023 the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, George Michael, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine, andThe Spinners in the performer category.
