Hit Me with Your Best Shot: Pat Benatar, Neil Giraldo, and the Twenty-Two-Year Hall of Fame Wait
She was eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. She was inducted in 2022. The twenty-two-year delay was not, by her own subsequent account, an accident — she had been turning down individual induction since the institution first became willing to consider her, refusing to accept the honor unless her musical partner and husband of forty years was inducted alongside her. The standard rock-history vocabulary has consistently positioned her as a solo MTV pop-rock vocalist whose commercial peak ended around 1985 and whose subsequent career has been a slow nostalgia-circuit decline. The accurate version is more interesting, substantially better documented, and centers a creative partnership the broader rock-criticism vocabulary has spent four decades failing to recognize.
By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 17 min read