Rock star calls out Rock Hall of Fame for ‘huge prejudice’ against his band

Rik Emmett, guitarist and vocalist of the Canadian rock band Triumph, is accusing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for never giving his band serious consideration due to prejudices.

Emmett claimed the Rock Hall has a bias against his band because Triumph does not have the same commercial success as other bands and inductees.

“So voting-wise, we were never that big, we didn’t sell enough records, we didn’t have enough of a commercial, industrial kind of impact to have it be that the people go, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, I remember when they went quadruple platinum?’” he said in a recent Misplaced Straws interview.

“We never did go quadruple platinum. We struggled to get platinum, to get gold up to platinum, and it would eventually happen with some of the records, but not very many of them.” Emmett said before mentioning bands like Journey and Foreigner, the latter which is among this year’s Rock Hall inductees.

Emmett explained further that one of the main reasons why Triumph has been ignored as inductees is due to “huge prejudice” from Rolling Stone and Hall of Fame co-founder Jann Wenner.

Emmett said Wenner would hire writers to write poor things about Triumph in Rolling Stone so that they would not be considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“It bled throughout the entire board of that thing, which was, ‘No, we’re only going to recognize the truly great and the thing that defines truly great is what I say is truly great,’” Emmett said about Wenner.

Emmett also mentioned how Triumph has consistently been compared to, and beat out by, bands with a similar sound, but who have been more commercially successful.

“In the early days, it was like, ‘Well, you’re not going to win. Rush is going to win.’ Of course, Rush is going to win. And then it was more like the Canadian music business had shifted,” Emmett explained. “It was like, ‘Well, you’re not going to win. Glass Tiger is going to win. You’re not going to win. Platinum Blonde is going to win.’ It was like, yeah, okay, things shifted.”

Triumph has been nominated for multiple Juno Awards — including the “Group of the Year Award” in 1979, 1985, 1986 and 1987 — but never won.

Triumph was, however, inducted into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame in 2007, the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2008 and into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2019.

But Emmett even felt that these accolades were gimmicky, in a way.

“The CARAS people kind of went, ‘Well, they’ve stuck around, they lasted so long, and they got back together again. They did that. The Industry Hall of Fame took them. The Rock Hall, so, okay, we should give them a Hall of Fame award,’” So, you know, we got that,” he explained in the interview. “I think it was literally just for persistence, for living long enough.”

Triumph has released 10 studio albums since its debut in 1976, and has sold more than 15 million records, Billboard reported in 2019.

The band is best known for the songs “Lay It on the Line,” “Magic Power,” “Fight the Good Fight,” and “World of Fantasy.”

The 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees are Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Cher, Dave Matthews Band, Eric B. & Rakim, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Jane’s Addiction, Kool & the Gang, Lenny Kravitz, Oasis, Sinéad O’Connor, Ozzy Osbourne, Sade, and A Tribe Called Quest.