As noted a week or two ago in a post of much the same name as this one, what to make of Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner and his bizarre comments about women and black musical artists. As Vox reports:
To see the full extent of this limited worldview on display, let us look at the coup de grace of les erreurs du mois — the remarkable, jaw-droppingly obtuse decision of Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner to include zero Black artists or women in his forthcoming book, meant to represent the depth and breadth of Wenner's career and his place in the legacy of rock and roll. The book, titled The Masters, releases September 26, and features seven interviews with rock legends like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. What speaks louder than the interviews themselves are the breathtaking gaps in Wenner's concept of "mastery" and who is capable of attaining it.
SonofStan noted on this site that:
There's a roughly 50/50 gender balance in students taking music and music related courses in UK universities. The proportion of women to men employed in music related roles across the industry is c16 / 84%. (or was the last report I read on this).
Not unconnected, the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner has a new book out where he defends his choice of artists – all white men – thusly
Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner says his new book of rock-star interviews only features white men because no women and Black artists were "articulate enough on this intellectual level"
He explicitly defended his choice of Bono as 'a rock philosopher' over Joni Mitchell…. who apprently doesn't have enough to say for herself.
New York Times columnist David Marchese grilled Wenner this past weekend about his choice to spend a career that spanned five decades refusing to interview women and Black artists. ("I read [other] interviews with them," Wenner told Marchese.) His myopic vision cuts a giant swath through the legacy of 20th- and 21st-century rock, omitting everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Cyndi Lauper. As Marchese notes, Wenner self-effacingly writes that Black and female creators simply weren't part of his "zeitgeist," as if that justifies his unwillingness to include them.
But as Vox says:
Consider what "zeitgeist" Wenner experienced. Rolling Stone was founded in 1967, and Wenner served as its editorial director until 2019. He also co-created the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was its "public face" until his retirement as chair in 2020. (After the Times interview, he was immediately ousted from his ongoing role on the Hall of Fame's board.) It's hard to overstate just how much of a rock industry insider Wenner was; he was close friends with the Rolling Stones and with most of the people he interviewed over the years. He didn't just glimpse artistic genius, he hobnobbed with it on the daily.
Fair enough. Though I don't know that I buy the idea articulated in the article that Wenner 'more directly responsible than any other person' for 'curating the musical zeitgeist' for the latter part of the 20th century. That seems to reify Rolling Stone to an absurd extent. It was important, particularly in the 1970s, but it was very much US centred and I wonder what impact it had more broadly from the 80s onwards. Of course I have to acknowledge my own specific bias in so far as the inkies were - obviously, much more prominent on this side of the Atlantic, and later other music magazines (and I've no illusions that the inkies were unalloyed tribunes of truth and light and diversity when it came to music - but still, they seem a world away from the attitudes exemplified by Wenner). RS always had a fusty, rather corporate atmosphere to me. I doubt I've read more than a handful of copies. That may be my loss.
Still, no disagreement with the following:
Yet, somehow, Wenner did not recognize a single Black artist as a "master," despite rock music being born from Black culture, despite the work of artists like Stevie Wonder and Prince. Nor could he acknowledge a single female artist, despite living through the eras of Tapestry and Blue, Rumours, Whitney, Jagged Little Pill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, 1989, and Lemonade. In the interview, he instead suggested that Black artists and women simply weren't "articulate" about the craft.
"Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level," he told Marchese. "The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock. Of Black artists ... I mean, they just didn't articulate at that level."
That level of glibness, dismissiveness, let's call it what it is, idiocy, is something else. But the piece isn't wrong in arguing that it was of a piece with a worldview exemplified by Rolling Stone - one where white males were the key makers of culture, at least in this area, and others... weren't.
Those examples pointed to in the article, Prince, King et al, can be added to a thousandfold and more. Ignoring women's voices is to literally ignore one half of the species. It's a category error of grievous proportions. And likewise with Black, Asian and other voices (as another aside one of the real pleasures for me is in finding music in a range of genres, folk, metal, shoe gaze, goth, electronica, that people across the globe like or make - it's almost a strange sort of human solidarity listening to and internalising then reworking and remaking music so that it is identifiable and also new: the old trick of popular music across the ages, that alchemy that makes something almost mundane special, reproduced, reiterated, transmuted once again. A little miracle that somehow every generation manages to carry off).
The piece is spot on:
Yet Wenner just said the quiet part out loud: It wasn't cluelessness, nor was it an oversight. It was intentional dismissal and disrespect underpinned not just by entrenched racism and misogyny, but also by Wenner's breathtaking arrogance and insulation from critique.
And I think it is particularly accurate about the insulating and cocooning effects of privilege and wealth. It simply never occurred to him that he was ill-equipped to 'curate' his chosen area, let alone wade into public expressions about same. He was beyond check from acquaintances, colleagues or whoever. No one was going to tap him gently on the shoulder and tell him, 'maybe best not to say that'. Worse again, no one was there to say to him, 'you're flat out wrong, go listen to this...'
If anything what comes across to me is that he made one basic error. He didn't actually open himself to listening to music (beyond a narrow and predictable sliver). Because if he did he'd have recognised immediately how wrong he was.
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