YEAR
2023
INDUCTED BY
Big Boi
CATEGORY
Performers
Her radical experimentation with lush soundscapes, literary themes, sampling, and theatricality have inspired everyone from Johnny Rotten to Björk to Big Boi.
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Ann Powers
The first star to embody twenty-first-century pop – in all its genre-defying, tech-forward, theatrical, profoundly feminine glory – made her recording debut in 1978. The rock world didn’t know what to do with her. “What is this supposed to be?” wrote one flummoxed journalist about teenage Kate Bush upon hearing her debut album, with its single “Wuthering Heights” based on Emily Brontë’s gothic romance. After the song hit Number One on the British pop charts, another critic described her wailing coloratura and unfettered songwriting as “a full-frontal attack on the brains of the nation.”