Jann Wenner is a giant of rock music history, even though he never fronted a band, composed a hit song, or produced a gold record. As the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Wenner became a tastemaking publisher; for years, anybody who was anybody in popular music got a mention in Rolling Stone. Wenner’s clout also allowed him to co-found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
Wenner is also a devoted man of the left. Rolling Stone’s coverage has always been unabashedly left-wing, and its co-founding publisher earned his bona fides protesting in Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and working for hippie rags like Ramparts.
But now the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has removed the publisher from its board, issuing a statement Saturday that read, “Jann Wenner has been removed from the Board of Directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation.”
So why did the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame dump Wenner from its board? It definitely has nothing to do with the 2017 accusations that Wenner forced himself on a male staffer. After all, when it comes to Wenner and Rolling Stone, #MeToo isn’t #DudesToo; it’s only for falsified stories of assault on college campuses.
Instead, intersectionality has caught up with Wenner, and it came to haunt him in the form of his new book and an unfortunate interview he gave with the New York Times to promote it.
“Wenner created a firestorm doing publicity for his new book ‘The Masters,’ which features interviews with musicians Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend, and U2’s Bono — all white and male,” reports the Associated Press.
The book sounds like a Boomer’s dream come true, but it wasn’t enough that Wenner only limited his list of “masters” to white men. Nope, he had to make it worse by getting a little mouthy about why he only wrote about the white guys.
Wenner made things worse for himself in a New York Times interview that the paper published on Friday. Interviewer David Marchese confronted Wenner about his choice of interview subjects, saying, “In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind is not plausible for Jann Wenner.”
In other words, Marchese believes that somebody as progressive as Wenner couldn’t possibly only want to interview the most derivative and predictable collection of interview subjects that he did. Wenner responded to that backhanded gushing by shoving his foot so far into his mouth that he kicked his tonsils.
“The selection was not a deliberate selection,” Wenner replied. (Huh? Did you accidentally choose the interviews you included in the book?) “It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them.”
It got worse when Wenner added, “Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.” Yeah, he said that, and when Marchese graciously allowed him to backtrack and clarify, Wenner didn’t do himself any favors.
“It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses,” Wenner elaborated. “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock.”
Why didn’t he lead with the “philosophers of rock” thing? Then Wenner got down to why he didn’t include black artists in his book.
“Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” Wenner went on, clearly not worrying about winning or losing any fans here. “I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”
Wow. Why did Wenner dig himself into such a deep hole? Why didn’t he simply say, “I interviewed the artists I gravitated to the most and who interested me the most”?
Marchese even gave him an out with his next (rambling) question: “Don’t you think it’s actually more to do with your own interests as a fan and a listener than anything particular to the artists? I think the problem is when you start saying things like ‘they’ or ‘these artists can’t.’ Really, it’s a reflection of what you’re interested in more than any ability or inability on the part of these artists, isn’t it?”
But in his answer, Wenner revealed his true leftist colors by reducing it all to box-checking: “You know, just for public relations sake, maybe I should have gone and found one Black and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism.”
That’s what it’s about for the left, after all. All Wenner could have done to appease the left was to throw the smallest of bones at those minorities the left panders to. Just check the box(es). But he didn’t, and now he’s off the board of the organization he helped found.
The left is always going to devour itself. We’ve seen it time and time again, and Wenner is just the latest in a long line of casualties. He won’t be the last, either.
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