On the Charts

On the Charts: Part 1

Back in 1994, when I became the Hall of Fame’s chief curator, I was determined that, among other things, the Museum not become a mausoleum for rock and roll. Indeed, there were many people who felt that was inevitable; those folks believed that a museum was antithetical to rock and roll’s spirit, and any attempt to deal with the music in a museum setting was tantamount to a death sentence.

I wanted to prove those people wrong and show them that it was possible to pay tribute to the power of rock and roll without embalming it. Beyond that, I thought it was extremely important that, in addition to presenting the music’s history, the Museum demonstrate that rock and roll is alive and thriving.

To that end, we included exhibits on hip hop and grunge when we opened the Museum in September 1995. At the time, those were both pretty contemporary exhibits, but in the world of rock and roll, six years is an eternity, and things have changed considerably. Yet it’s virtually impossible to change exhibits in a museum as frequently as things change in pop culture.

So last summer we came up with one solution to this dilemma: we created a new exhibit called On the Charts. Located on the Museum’s plaza level, the exhibit is intended to reflect, well, what’s on the charts. In its first iteration, the exhibit focused on the teen pop phenomenon and included such items as outfits ‘N Sync wore in their “It’s Gonna Be Me” video, the red catsuit Britney Spears wore in her video for “Oops!...I Did It Again,” costumes from the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium tour and the outfits Christina Aguilera wore on the cover of her first album and at the 1999 Grammy Awards.

We’ve recently reinstalled the exhibit so that it represents a broader range of what’s on the charts. Madonna, Eminem, 3 Doors Down, Rage Against the Machine, Destiny’s Child, Everclear, No Doubt and Nine Days are among the artists now featured. Much like MTV’s Total Request Live, the exhibit makes the point that even though hip hop and teen pop dominate the news, there’s a lot more going on in contemporary music. It also shows that rock and roll - in its traditional guitar-bass-and-drums format - is still out there.

In addition to keeping our visitors a little better informed about contemporary music, the exhibit provides another, perhaps more valuable service. It enables kids and their parents to share and explore their varied musical tastes. Last summer, when teen pop was the subject of On the Charts, it was extremely popular with our younger visitors. It was gratifying to see their reaction when they saw items that they were actually familiar with, and one could overhear their conversations with their parents explaining the significance of the various pieces.

Check back in for part 2 of this column