The nominations for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026 are in, and the list contains Phil Collins, Lauryn Hill, Mariah Carey, Oasis, Pink, the Black Crowes, Jeff Buckley, Melissa Etheridge, Billy Idol, INXS, Iron Maiden, Joy Division/New Order, New Edition, Sade, Shakira, Luther Vandross, and the Wu-Tang Clan.
The inductees will be announced in April alongside the acts receiving the Musical Influence Award, the Musical Excellence Award, and the Ahmet Ertegun Non-Performer Award. The annual ceremony will take place in the fall.
“This diverse list of talented nominees recognizes the ever-evolving faces and sounds of rock & roll and its continued impact on youth culture,” says John Sykes, chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. “Induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is music’s highest honor, and we look forward to celebrating the class of 2026 this fall.”
To qualify for this year’s ballot, each nominee’s first single or album had to have been released in 2001 or earlier. Ten of the 17 nominees (Buckley, Collins, Etheridge, Hill, INXS, New Edition, Pink, Shakira, Vandross, Wu-Tang Clan) are on the ballot for the first time. They’ve all been eligible in prior years.
This is the third nomination for Carey, Iron Maiden, and Joy Division/New Order, and the second for the Black Crowes, Oasis, Sade, and Idol.
If Iron Maiden get in, odds are fairly decent they won’t show. “I actually think the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is an utter and complete load of bollocks, to be honest with you,” Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson said in 2018. “It’s run by a bunch of sanctimonious bloody Americans who wouldn’t know rock & roll if it hit them in the face. They need to stop taking Prozac and start drinking fucking beer.”
Liam Gallagher of Oasis has expressed similar sentiments. “As much as I love Mariah Carey and all that, I want to say: Do me a favor and fuck off,” he told The Sunday Times in 2024. “It’s like putting me in the rap hall of fame, and I don’t want to be part of anything that mentally disturbed. Besides, I’ve done more for rock & roll than half of them clowns on that board, so it’s all a load of bollocks.”
But when a fan on X asked what he’d do if they got last year, he wrote, “Obv go and say it’s the best thing EVER.” (If he pulls that move, he’ll join a long of acts — including Cher, Rush, and Def Leppard — who sang a very different tune about the Hall of Fame once they actually got in.)
The induction ceremony would be an opportunity for Collins to make a rare live appearance, the Black Crowes to take the stage with estranged drummer Steve Gorman, and Joy Division/New Order to appear with ex-bassist Peter Hook for the first time since he left the band in 2007.
“It will be a difficult awards ceremony if we get there, but as my wife said, we’ve got to rise above these things … and be nice and be courteous and think the best,” Hook told Billboard in 2023. “Maybe this is the olive branch that we may need to end the injustices that were done with New Order in the end. It’s a very strange position to be in but, y’know, we’re not the first group that’s been ostracized by each other, and we won’t be the last.”
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.