Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2020 inductees announced
This year's inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame were announced Wednesday.
The biggest name on the list is Whitney Houston, who will be posthumously enshrined. Houston died in 2012.
Jon Landau and Irving Azoff are the recipients of the Ahmet Ertegun Award, which honors songwriters, producers, DJ's, record executives, journalists and other industry professionals that have had a major influence on rock music.
The Induction Ceremony will take place in May 2nd at the Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It will be broadcast live on HBO at 7:00p.m. central time.
Artists are eligible for the hall 25 years after they release their first commercial recording. Ballots are cast by an international lvoting body of more than 1,000 artists inlcuding other inductees, historians and members of the industry.
Four of this years's inductees were first timers on the ballot. The Doobie Brothers, Whitney Houston, Notorious B.I.G. and T-Rex made it on their first one. This is the 35th class going into the hall.
Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston was inarguably one of the biggest pop stars of all time. Her accomplishments as a hitmaker were extraordinary.
She became the first artist ever to have seven consecutive singles hit number one, and her 1993 Dolly Parton cover "I Will Always Love You" became the biggest hit single in rock history.
MTV latched on to the band and helped break them to a bigger audience. Their follow-up, "The Downward Spiral" debuted at number two on the Billboard charts and is now widely considered to be a masterpiece.
Bolan started playing with psychedelia and folk-rock until he turned to a rock and roll, boogie rythem along with a lot of attention being paid to how the band "looked".
Biggie Smalls, as he was also known, helped establish the East Coast rap sound in the 90's behind songs like "Hypnotize" and "Big Poppa". His music told stories of the often-violent life on the streets, he rarely romanticized it, and told stories with grit and realism that directly influenced other rappers like Jay-Z and Nas.
