Who's who of rock 'n' roll — from young stars to legends — celebrate Hall of Fame inductees
CBC
Cyndi Lauper turned True Colors into a defiant call for courage, and the music of Outkast, Soundgarden and the White Stripes moved the house on Saturday night at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
Partway through the song, Lauper shouted the line “don’t be afraid!,” thrust her fist in the air and kept it there as the music stopped for a long and dramatic stretch.
She was then joined by Raye to sing Time After Time and Avril Lavigne for Girls Just Want to Have Fun. As Lauper called for the ladies to sing with her, Salt-N-Pepa — who earlier in the night donned their old tri-colour jackets to rock the crowd with Push It for their induction — came dancing out and joined her.
Chappell Roan, who inducted Lauper while wearing a huge, ornamented, showgirl-style headpiece, said Lauper "redefined what a pop star could look like, sound like, sing like.”
Lauper looked at Roan during her speech when she said, “I know that I stand on the shoulders of the women in the industry that came before me. And my shoulders are broad enough to have the women that came after me stand on mine.”
Lauper came back for an all-star jam and sang a verse of inductee Joe Cocker’s cover of With a Little Help From My Friends along with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes, Teddy Swims and Bryan Adams. Cocker was one of several posthumous nominees, with a moving tribute to late Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell.
The power of women in music was called out loudly earlier in the evening at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles during the induction of Salt-N-Pepa.
“This is for every woman who picked up a mic when they told her she couldn’t,” Cheryl “Salt” James said in a rousing speech accepting her, Sandra “Pepa” Denton and DJ Spinderella’s entrance into the hall.
James brought up their fight to reclaim their master recordings from Universal Music Group. “The industry still doesn’t want to play fair, Salt-N-Pepa have never been afraid of a fight,” James said.
They took the stage for a medley of their hits. They opened with Shoop, then slid into Let’s Talk About Sex before En Vogue joined them for their joint hit What a Man.
James apologized to the fans who “got in trouble for cutting their hair like us,” a line that reverberated later when Roan said that Lauper showed you could “have whatever hair colour you want.”
Outkast didn’t perform together for the first time since 2016 as some had hoped, but the duo stood together on stage, surrounded by a crew of friends and cohorts as they gave grateful speeches after doing rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go first.
André 3000 gave a long, rambling funny speech — “I’m freestylin’ y’all!” — that ended in tears when he talked about their very beginnings in a basement “dungeon” in Atlanta in the early 1990s.
He choked out the words, “Great things start in little rooms.”
