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When asked for a definition of jazz, Louis Armstrong famously remarked that "If you have to ask, you'll never know." I think rock is similarly resistant to intellectualization, hence the difficulty authors such as this one have in bounding and defining the genre. It's a little like zen, you just can't deal with it in that way, it slips from your fingers.

Similarly, the notion of a Hall Of Fame for rock and roll strikes me as missing the point entirely. The formal recognition, the plaster busts, the pomp, the ceremony, (the thousand-dollar tickets); all of that is profoundly antithetical to what rock and roll is, which is a rejection of all of those things. And selecting a single exemplar of the genre is pretty much doomed from the outset: if you could do that, it wouldn't be rock and roll. For example, should this exemplar be famous? It isn't required of a rock and roll musician, in fact, with fame comes the accusation of selling out (Tool recorded a lovely song about that entitled "Hooker with a" and I forget the rest). Technically competent? Well, the requirements for Louie Louie are very far from those of something laid down by Petrucci or Satriani or the like. Sell a lot of records? Nope. Near as I can tell, the perfect exemplar of rock is a musician with a serious drink/drug problem who has an undefinable gut appeal and dies tragically at a young age (27 is about right) of some sort of overdose or especially an air transportation accident. Somewhere in there music may or may not be involved. Hmm...we've defined ourselves right out of the game.

Don't over-intellectualize rock. Just enjoy it.