Rolling Stone cofounder Jann Wenner (D-Scumbag) is no longer part of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame:
“Jann Wenner has been removed from the Board of Directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the hall said Saturday, a day after Wenner’s comments were published in a New York Times interview.
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Wenner co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 and served as its editor or editorial director until 2019. He also co-founded the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was launched in 1987.
The 77-year-old Wenner has a new book called The Masters: Conversations with Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, Bono, and Springsteen. While doing publicity rounds for the book last week, Wenner talked to the far-left New York Times. During the interview, the Times asked:
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. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going — not in your zeitgeist? What do you think is the deeper explanation for why you interviewed the subjects you interviewed and not other subjects?
Now, before we get to Wenner’s jaw-dropping answer, allow me to say this: That is a perfectly reasonable question. We’re talking about rock ‘n’ roll here, not polo. Besides the names above, why not Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Prince, The Ronettes, The Supremes, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles…? You can argue that some of those names don’t represent rock ‘n’ roll, but neither does Bob Dylan.
Tina Turner performs on stage at Ahoy, Rotterdam, Netherlands, November 4, 1990. (Rob Verhorst/Redferns)
The far-left Wenner’s answer once again illuminated the left’s condescending bigotry that gives so many of them an unearned sense of superiority [emphasis added throughout]:
The selection was not a deliberate selection. 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. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.
The Times then gave him a chance to rephrase it.
“It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses,” Wenner said. “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest.”
Janis Joplin and her final group, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, perform at the Festival for Peace at Shea Stadium on August 06, 1970.
“Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” Wenner added. “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.”
Wenner wants us to believe that Marvin Gaye, who wrote, produced, and performed the What’s Going On album, “didn’t articulate at that level.”
Marvin Gaye performs onstage during the ‘Sexual Healing’ tour at Radio City Music Hall, New York, New York, May 19, 1983. (Gary Gershoff/Getty Images)
Wenner kept digging:
The selection was intuitive. It was what I was interested in. 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. Which, I get it. I had a chance to do that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned and I don’t give a [expletive] or whatever. I wish in retrospect I could have interviewed Marvin Gaye. Maybe he’d have been the guy. Maybe Otis Redding, had he lived, would have been the guy.
“Had he lived?”
Gaye was around four years longer than John Lennon, and Lennon made the cut.
Wenner has issued an apology:
In my interview with The New York Times, I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius, and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks. The Masters is a collection of interviews I’ve done over the years that seemed to me to best represent an idea of rock ‘n’ roll’s impact on my world; they were not meant to represent the whole of music and it’s diverse and important originators but to reflect the high points of my career and interviews I felt illustrated the breadth and experience in that career. They don’t reflect my appreciation and admiration for myriad totemic, world-changing artists whose music and ideas I revere and will celebrate and promote as long as I live. I totally understand the inflammatory nature of badly chosen words and deeply apologize and accept the consequences.
The apology doesn’t bother to address the real problem, which is his repeated use of the word “inarticulate” to describe people based on their sex and skin color.
The very idea is anti-science. Along with Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, it was black people who birthed rock ‘n’ roll. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ike Turner, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton… Who are the masters again?
As a side note, the Times also asked Wenner about Rolling Stone’s 2014 infamous fake story, “A Rape on Campus, ” which resulted in the left-wing publication settling libel suits. Wenner actually said this, “Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof.”
In 2017, Wenner was credibly accused of sexual misconduct.
Over the years, I’ve read hundreds of biographies, and one thing is almost always true: When I close the book, despite their flaws, mistakes, egos, and all the other things that make humans human, I tend to feel empathy towards the subject. That doesn’t apply to history’s monsters like the socialist trio of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but you’d be surprised. But there are three major exceptions. The first is Kurt Cobain, the second is Mickey Rooney, and the third is Jann Wenner. I’ve read Wenner’s biography and autobiography. There is nothing redeeming about this man. He’s a selfish user, a mercenary backstabber, and a starfucker’s starfucker with the scruples of a gangster. And now we know he’s a racist and sexist.
Here’s a man so racist he had the golden opportunity to pick the brains of the greatest names in music and didn’t. Can you imagine being able to talk with James Brown, Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard and not doing it?
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.