The 39th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony turned Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland, Ohio, into a “celebration” Saturday night as Kool & the Gang, Dave Matthews Band, Mary J. Blige, A Tribe Called Quest and Cher showed up to accept inductions from Chuck D, Julia Roberts, Method Man, Dr. Dre, Dave Chappelle and Zendaya.
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The event returned to the hometown of the Rock & Roll Museum for the first time since 2021. This year’s top music-industry honor in the performer category went to Mary J. Blige, Cher, Dave Matthews Band, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Kool & The Gang, Ozzy Osbourne and A Tribe Called Quest. Musical Excellence Award honorees included Jimmy Buffett, MC5, Dionne Warwick and Norman Whitfield; Alexis Korner, John Mayall and Big Mama Thornton received the Musical Influence Award. Motown executive Suzanne de Passe received the Ahmet Ertegun Award — the fifth woman to accept the accolade.
Four out of the eight inductees in the performer category were on the ballot for the first time: Cher, Foreigner, Kool & the Gang and Peter Frampton.
“We are swimming in deep water here,” says Matthews of the class of 2024.
The five-and-a-half-hour ceremony intertwined moving speeches and career highlight reels with performances that repeatedly brought the packed house to its feet. The event’s momentum builds around the surprise of who will perform with whom. This year featured a mashup of inductees and those following in their iconic footsteps as Dua Lipa joined Cher, and Ella Mai and Lucky Daye both dueted with Mary J. Blige. Kelly Clarkson, Demi Lovato, Chad Smith, Slash and Sammy Hagar formed a Foreigner supergroup, as did James Taylor, Mac McAnally and Kenny Chesney, to pay tribute to their late friend Jimmy Buffet . Smith returned for the Ozzy Osbourne induction, playing with Maynard James Keenan, Jelly Roll, Billy Idol and more. Jack Black did the honors for Osbourne, who took it all in from a “bat” chair.
Below are the top moments from the 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, streaming now on Disney+ and airing Jan. 1 on ABC.
Cher’s Change of Heart
To kick start the evening, Dua Lipa took the stage in a long black leather dress hinged with delicate chains over fishnet stockings, belting Cher’s anthem “Believe.” Then Cher, in leather chaps, joined Dua, and the duo linked hands triumphantly, hitting the chorus of the 1998 comeback song. Zendaya delivered Cher’s induction speech in a Bob Mackie nude-illusion halter dress that channeled one of the icon’s classic looks from 1975. The actress said of the superstar, who had not received a Hall of Fame nomination until this year, “Cher has got the goods,” drawing eyes to the stat that Cher is the only solo artist to have a No. 1 hit in each of the last seven decades and calling her “the coolest woman on the planet.” Cher’s video tribute reel featured soundbites from Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper and Pink.
Cher began her acceptance speech by addressing the elephant in the room: “It was easier getting divorced from two men than it was getting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” She has been outspoken about being overlooked for so many years by the organization, telling Kelly Clarkson in 2022, “I wouldn’t be in it now if they gave me a million dollars.”
She had a change of heart and thanked David Geffen for taking the award to the finish line: “I want to thank my guardian, David Geffen, because he wrote a letter and sent it to the directors, and so here I am. Thank you, David. Thank you for caring so much about me.”
Throughout the address, her theme was resilience. She detailed her career’s ups and downs and maintained a sense of pride and self-worth not based on being the prettiest, smartest or most talented in the room.
“I’m talking to the women,” she added. “We’ve been down and out, and we keep striving and we keep going and we keep building and we are somebody. We are special.”
Chuck D’s Kool-Pentameter
The Public Enemy frontman inducted a group long overlooked by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Kool & the Gang. D’s speech was pure poetry in “Kool” rhythm, a soulful, funky riff of verbal praise.
He noted that “few artists have been sampled by hip-hop producers more than Kool & the Gang” and “let it be known: this is a long-overdue celebration,” noting that “Y’all know the deal, birthdays, weddings, sports, championships. Y’all know the drill … The get down to the get down to the get down on it … I’m just saying that hey, hey, hey, good job is always on our minds, inside wild and peaceful jobs. To the get down to the jungle boogie, get down to the one down and jungle boogie, say ‘uh!’ I wanted to rap on that record. And if that wasn’t enough, there was more funky stuff.”
Mark Ronson, Lionel Richie, Usher and Anderson. Paak participated in the video introduction.
Representing Kool & the Gang, James J.T. Taylor and Robert ‘Kool’ Bell performed “Get Down on It,” “Jungle Boogie,” “Hollywood Swinging,” “Ladies’ Night” and “Celebration.”
Dionne Warwick Calls Teyana Taylor Her “Alter Ego”
Teyana Taylor, who will play Dionne Warwick in an upcoming biopic, graced the stage in a look reminiscent of the star from the 1960s with a bee-hive hairdo and olive-color empire-waist tasseled gown.
“It wasn’t until I got the role of a lifetime to play her in the upcoming biopic that I came to understand the depths of her talent,” Taylor says. “She has done an incredible service to the world with her music,” calling “Don’t Make Me Over” an anthem for women across the world and recognizing that Warwick bumped The Beatles off of the charts.
“Ms Warwick did not come to play, period,” Taylor says. “What the world needs now is love, sweet love, but what it really needs is more of Ms. Dionne Warwick.”
Jennifer Hudson sang “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” and was joined by Warwick, who also sang “Walk On By.”
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When Warwick accepted her award from Taylor, she said that “her alter ego is with me tonight.”
The Foreigner Super Group
You can always count on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony to unite musicians in unexpected ways, and 2024 didn’t disappoint on this front as Demi Lovato, Chad Smith, Slash, Sammy Hagar and Kelly Clarkson all came together to jam for Foreigner in the absence of Mick Jones and Dennis Elliott. Lovato sang “Feels Like The First Time,” Hagar took on “Hot Blooded,” and Clarkson duetted “I Want To Know What Love Is” with Lou Gramm. Jones’ daughter accepted the induction on behalf of her dad, who stopped performing with Foreigner when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2022.
Peter Frampton Gets Roasted and Rocks
Roger Daltrey turned his speech about Peter Frampton into a roast, poking at the rock god’s lack of prior nominations, starting his speech with, “I was astonished this guy wasn’t inducted 35 years ago.” He then shared that early on, Pete Townshend joked that packs of screaming girls had mistaken Daltrey for Frampton and Townshend for Tiny Tim. before giving him a ribbing over his endless farewell tours. Frampton jammed with Keith Urban on “Do You Feel Like We Do,” which was the most significant guitar moment of the night.
At the show’s end, Matthews included Frampton in his acceptance speech, telling the guitarist, “I think the world of you.”
Common, De La Soul, Queen Latifah and Busta Rhymes Deliver the Performance of the Night in Honor of A Tribe Called Quest
It began when Dave Chappelle took the mic to share arguably the most moving induction of the evening. He told the crowd that when he was having a difficult time, he read a Chinese proverb that reminded him of his friends in A Tribe Called Quest and the deep meaning of their friendship. “The best meal you can cook is made with ingredients that you already have,” he said.
Chappelle went on to say, “Being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not something that a Black kid in New York in 1985 would ever even imagine to dream of. And I don’t believe that was ever the point of A Tribe Called Quest. They met on a train. They met at school. They played basketball together. … They just used what they had. And the first thing they had was each other, as friends.”
He credits them with “incorporating jazz and soul in a way that hip-hop had never seen before them.”
Pulling a fact out of the rock history book, he shared that Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Tribe’s “Low-End Theory” were all released on the same day, September 24, 1991. He also praised them for being cool but not gangster—which sparked a new era for hip-hop.
Q-Tip and Jarobi White were present with late member Phife Dawg’s parents and wife, while fourth member Ali Shaheed Muhammad was not in attendance. They all gave speeches before the ’80s-’90s hip-hop collective, Native Tongues, featuring Busta Rhymes, The Roots, Queen Latifah, De La Soul and Common, paid tribute to their cohorts with “Scenario,” “Bonita Applebum,” and “Can I Kick It?” Rhymes’ “Scenario” drove the crowd to its feet in the name of love for hip-hop.
Mary J. Blige’s Mutal Admiration with Dr. Dre and Method Man
Dr Dre and Method Man did the honors for Mary J Blige, who sang “Love No Limit,” “Be Happy” and “Family Affair” in collaboration with up-and-comers Lucky Daye and Ella Mai. Blige was dripping in leather, latex and glittering stones in a look that read queen from top to toe. Dre credited Blige with creating an entirely new genre of music with her breakthrough album, “What’s the 411?” Blige then shared her respect for Method Man and Dre for helping her achieve GRAMMY and EMMY wins with their collaborative projects, the 1995’s Best Rap Performance By A Duo Or Group for “I’ll Be There For You / You’re All I Need To Get By,” and the 2022 Super Bowl Halftime show, respectively.
Julia Roberts Advises Don’t Google David Matthews
To close the night, the Dave Matthews Band performed all their biggest hits after “super fan” Julia Roberts’s induction, during which she shared a Google search gone wrong.
“Don’t Google David Matthews,” sharing that she stumbled upon a terrible story that the wrong Dave Matthew was a man in New Zealand in his sixties who had suffered from a stroke.
Then, she found the right person … “Googled on to discover — oh, friends with Adam Sandler didn’t know that there was no mention of — anyway, he and Ashley have a winery, cool label, good price point. Didn’t know. And then it reads, ‘When did Dave Matthews come out?’ But that refers to when the band first came out, as you know, a band. So these things happen when you name the band after yourself.”
In one of the night’s biggest surprises, DMB wrapped up the evening with “Burning Down the House,” a tribute to the Talking Heads 1983 album Speaking in Tongues .
To be considered for a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination, an artist or band must have released its first commercial recording at least 25 years before the year of nomination.
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