For many years, my Why Aren’t They in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? series sat in an odd place in my writing life. It was plainly about music, plainly about omission, and plainly about dissatisfaction with an institution—yet it never felt like advocacy, fandom, or grievance writing. I was not campaigning for inductions, nor attempting to correct taste. I was circling something harder to name.

Only much later did it become clear that the series was an early, intuitive engagement with what I now describe more formally as institutional failure and, more specifically, second-order failure.

At the surface level, the series asked a simple question: why do artists with demonstrable popularity, influence, and endurance fail to receive recognition from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? But the deeper question—the one that gave the series its staying power—was not about the artists at all. It was about criteria, authority, and legibility.

Even then, I was less interested in arguing that a given act “deserved” induction than in observing how exclusion was justified. Again and again, the explanations were not empirical but aesthetic and moral: insufficient coolness, lack of critical prestige, perceived inauthenticity, or failure to embody a particular narrative of rebellion. These were not standards that could be audited, replicated, or cleanly defended. They functioned as implicit norms, enforced without formal articulation.

What I did not yet have language for—but was clearly tracking—was that this represented a failure of institutional self-definition. The Hall could not, or would not, say whether it existed to recognize achievement, to curate a canon, to arbitrate taste, or to confer cultural virtue. That ambiguity was not accidental. It was structural, and it allowed power to be exercised without accountability.

In retrospect, those essays were not critiques of exclusion so much as diagnostics of boundary maintenance. The artists I wrote about occupied edge cases: widely loved but insufficiently sanctified, commercially successful but aesthetically suspect, influential but unfashionable. Edge cases are where institutions reveal what they truly value, because rules that work smoothly at the center begin to fail at the margins. My attention was drawn there instinctively, not strategically.

This is precisely the pattern that now anchors my work on institutional failure modes. First-order failure concerns what an institution gets wrong in its outputs: bad decisions, flawed selections, unjust exclusions. Second-order failure emerges when the institution becomes incapable of learning from those errors—when controversy no longer prompts reflection, but ritualized defense.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, like other chronically contested honor-granting bodies, demonstrates this second-order failure vividly. Disputes over induction are not resolved; they are replayed. The same arguments recur across decades, the same constituencies feel unheard, and the institution responds not by clarifying its mission but by doubling down on opacity. Over time, the controversy itself becomes a feature rather than a bug. Debate substitutes for legitimacy.

Seen in this light, the popularity of that early series is not surprising. Readers were not merely reacting to individual snubs. They were responding to the recognition—often unspoken—that an authoritative institution was invalidating large swaths of lived cultural experience without explanation. The essays gave language, however informal, to a shared intuition: that something was wrong, not with taste, but with governance.

What is striking is how consistent the posture was, even then, with my current approach. I did not demand reform. I did not moralize the selectors. I did not propose alternate canons. I simply laid the cases side by side and allowed the pattern to emerge. That restraint, I now believe, is what allowed the writing to age well. It treated the institution as a system under stress, not as an enemy to be defeated.

My current work on second-order failure extends this same logic beyond music. Whether the domain is religious governance, public institutions, professional bodies, or cultural canons, the failure mode is similar: unclear missions, over-moralized criteria, concentrated authority, and an inability to absorb edge cases without escalating conflict. When institutions mistake arbitration for recognition, they invite perpetual legitimacy crises.

The Why Aren’t They In series was an early field study in this dynamic, conducted before I had the vocabulary to name it as such. It examined a cultural institution at the moment where it stopped being a recorder of history and began acting—without admitting it—as a judge of worth. The discomfort readers felt was not nostalgia or fandom. It was the unease that arises when authority is exercised without procedural humility.

In that sense, the series now reads less like a detour and more like a foundation. It belongs to the same intellectual trajectory as my later white papers, policy manuals, and diagnostic frameworks. The subject matter changed; the question did not. The question has always been this: what happens when institutions cannot explain themselves, and what failures follow when they no longer try?

Seen that way, the essays were not about who was missing from a hall of fame. They were about what is lost when institutions forget the difference between honoring excellence and controlling meaning.