Dearborn mayor ramps up police protection for city after bigoted WSJ op-ed
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/us/politics/biden-aide-israel-regret.html
In a closed-door meeting, the aide offered some of the administration’s clearest notes of contrition for its response to the Gaza war, a sign of rising Democratic pressure on President Biden.
In a closed-door meeting with Arab American leaders in Michigan this week, one of President Biden’s top foreign policy aides acknowledged mistakes in the administration’s response to the war in Gaza, saying he did not have “any confidence” that Israel’s government was willing to take “meaningful steps” toward Palestinian statehood.
The remarks came after months of public and private admonitions from the Biden administration for Israel to take a more surgical approach in a conflict that has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians, according to health authorities in Gaza. On Thursday, Mr. Biden himself declared that Israel had gone “over the top” in its response to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.
The Biden aide, Jon Finer, a deputy national security adviser, offered some of the administration’s clearest expressions of regret for what he called “missteps” it had made from the beginning of the violence, and he pledged that it would do better.
During the meeting on Thursday with Arab American political leaders in Dearborn, Mich., Mr. Finer said, “We are very well aware that we have missteps in the course of responding to this crisis since Oct. 7,” according to a recording of the gathering obtained by The New York Times. A National Security Council official confirmed the recording was authentic.
Mr. Finer added: “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration and the country values the lives of Palestinians. And that began, frankly, pretty early in the conflict.”
The war in Gaza has become part of a cascade of political problems for Mr. Biden, who has remained publicly supportive of Israel and resisted demands within the Democratic Party to call for a cease-fire. His position since Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, along with his remarks casting doubt on the death toll from Israeli airstrikes and calling the loss of life “a price of waging war,” has angered young people, Black voters and progressives who are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Mr. Biden himself has acknowledged the pro-Palestinian protesters who have become a frequent presence at his public events. Last month, a campaign rally on abortion rights in Virginia was repeatedly interrupted by protesters urging Mr. Biden to call for a cease-fire.
After that rally, Mr. Biden met privately with about 40 invited attendees and urged them not to view demonstrators as political enemies, saying that they deserved sympathy and that their cause was “really important,” according to three people who attended the meeting.
A Biden campaign spokeswoman declined to comment.
But the recording of the Dearborn meeting provides an unusual behind-the-scenes glimpse at the administration’s attempts to shore up support in the critical battleground state of Michigan, which has a large Arab American population in Dearborn and other Detroit suburbs. Mr. Biden’s support in the state has eroded, polls show. His allies there have warned the White House in recent months that he runs the risk of losing the state, which he carried in 2020.
Mr. Finer and several other senior Biden administration officials, including Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, traveled to Dearborn on Thursday for a series of meetings, including the one in which Mr. Finer’s comments were recorded.
Those sessions came a week after Biden campaign aides, including Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the manager of his 2024 bid, quietly traveled to the city and met with a few officials, including Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American progressive who is at the forefront of Democratic calls for a cease-fire.
However, Mayor Abdullah
Hammoud of Dearborn and several other local officials declined to meet
with Ms. Chávez Rodríguez. Mr. Hammoud later issued a statement saying
he wished to speak with policymakers instead of campaign officials.
White House officials then scrambled to arrange a visit.
During the Thursday meetings, Mr. Finer articulated the American government’s efforts to bring a halt to the war in Gaza. Building a formal diplomatic relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia, he said, is a critical step toward creating a Palestinian state. Doing so, he added, requires politically difficult sacrifices from both countries and the United States.
“We will have to do things for Saudi Arabia that will be very unpopular in this country and in our Congress,” Mr. Finer said. “Will Israel be willing to do the hard thing that’s going to be required of them, which is meaningful steps for the Palestinians on the question of two states? I don’t know if the answer to that is yes. I do not have any confidence in this current government of Israel.”
Mr. Finer also said the Biden administration should have been faster to publicly condemn statements made by some Israeli officials that, in his words, compared “residents of Gaza to animals.” He said officials had not done so because they were trying to work with the Israeli government.
“Out of a desire to sort of focus on solving the problem and not engaging in a rhetorical back-and-forth with people who, in many cases, I think we all find somewhat abhorrent, we did not sufficiently indicate that we totally rejected and disagreed with those sorts of sentiments,” Mr. Finer said.
He did not clarify which Israeli officials he was referring to, but in the conflict’s early days, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Some other Israeli officials have also faced criticism for dehumanizing language.
Mr. Finer’s most explicit note of contrition was for a statement released under Mr. Biden’s name on Jan. 14, marking 100 days since the conflict began. The statement focused on the plight of American and Israeli hostages being held in Gaza and made no reference to Palestinians who had been killed.
“It did not in any way address the loss of Palestinian life during the course of the first 100 days of the conflict,” Mr. Finer said. “There is no excuse for that. It should not have happened. I believe it will not happen again. But we know that there was a lot of damage done.”
Mr. Finer, who declined to comment, is the second-ranking official on the National Security Council, under Jake Sullivan, who is Mr. Biden’s national security adviser.
Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said: “The president and Mr. Finer were reflecting on concerns we have had for some time, and will continue to have as the Israeli operation proceeds, about the loss of Palestinian lives in this conflict and the need to reduce civilian harm.”
The Michiganders who attended the Thursday meetings with Biden administration officials described them as intense and said they were disappointed that the delegation from Washington had not committed to policy changes.
For example, administration officials declined to say whether they had advised or would advise the president to call for a cease-fire, which attendees asked for.
“You’re not going to get that answer,” said Steve Benjamin, the director of the White House’s public engagement office.
But the officials committed to issuing a letter clarifying the administration’s support of the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which the United States temporarily cut funding for after Israel accused some of its staff members of participating in the Oct. 7 attack. The Biden officials did not engage with questions from the Michigan leaders about the president’s electoral prospects in the state.
“We emphasized that beyond communication, there needs to be a change in policies,” said Abraham Aiyash, a Democratic state representative who is the majority leader in the Michigan House of Representatives. “We were clear that there would be no follow-up meetings in any capacity if there was not a shift in policy based on the tangible steps that we outlined for them today.”
Abbas Alawieh, a former congressional aide who attended the meeting, said it was “outrageous” that it had taken more than 100 days after the war started for the administration to engage with Dearborn, and that Mr. Biden had not visited himself.
Mr. Biden met with Arab and Muslim American leaders in October, amid growing tensions inside and outside the White House, and apologized for questioning the Gaza death toll and for other messaging from the administration. But he largely defended his support for Israel’s war, pointing to foreign policy considerations.
In November, administration officials also met by videoconference with Palestinian American leaders who expressed concern about surveys showing the plunging support for Mr. Biden in their communities. The officials told them that polling numbers did not dictate the president’s foreign policy decisions.
“People feel not just a vague sense of betrayal, but a bone-deep sense of betrayal by President Biden,” Mr. Alawieh said.
Assad I. Turfe, the deputy Wayne County executive, who also heard from the Biden aides on Thursday, said Mr. Biden should be judged by how soon the conflict in Gaza is resolved.
“The Biden administration must act swiftly and decisively to end this violence, honoring the principles of justice and human rights,” Mr. Turfe said.
On Tuesday, a group of Arab American and Muslim leaders in Michigan, led by Ms. Tlaib’s sister, announced a campaign to persuade Democrats angry about Mr. Biden’s stance on Israel to vote “Uncommitted,” against the president, in the state’s Democratic primary election on Feb. 27. Though such a move would most likely have little practical effect, it could embarrass the president if enough voters chose to participate.
Former Representative Andy Levin of Michigan called the campaign “a constructive thing for the president” and said he was encouraging fellow Democrats to vote Uncommitted — though he declined to say how he planned to vote in the primary.
“On Gaza, we’re going to have to keep pushing him,” Mr. Levin said in an interview.
Osama A. Siblani, the influential publisher of The Arab American News, a Dearborn newspaper, had meetings with both Ms. Chávez Rodríguez and Mr. Finer’s delegation. He said Arab American voters in Michigan felt betrayed after backing Mr. Biden in large numbers in 2020, arguing that they had “received nothing” since then “but lip service.”
“I’ve been involved in this community day in and day out every single day for 40 years,” Mr. Siblani said. “I can tell you right now, I cannot convince my community to vote for Biden if I kiss their feet. They will not do it.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent, covering President Biden and his administration. More about Erica L. Green
Colonial law and the erasure of Palestine w/Noura Erakat The Chris Hedges Report
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In Palestine, the law has been used as a tool of oppression to legitimize and advance the dispossession of the Palestinian people for more than a century. From the theft of Palestinian land by legal mechanisms to the non-recognition of Palestinians as a people with the inalienable right of self-determination, the law is yet another weapon wielded against the Palestinian people by Israel and its patrons. Activist, attorney, and Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the use of lawfare against Palestine and her new book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.
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"In the Old World, two titans who sought to make themselves gods conspired to control history and their place in it. They anointed themselves arbiters of sound — one an impresario, the other a scribe, both shadow figures in search of permanence. They devised a hall that would house The Greats and took turns inducting those they deemed worthy: above all else, those around them. And they did so in secret, away from prying eyes and pointed questions. They thought themselves enlightened men, bringing art appreciation to the philistines, when really they longed to be kingmakers, therein casting their shadows across an unwitting realm. They erected their tabernacle in Ohio.
In 2004, one of those titans, Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, inducted the other, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, another institution that they helped to co-found. Ertegun spoke of Wenner as the ultimate authority of popular music, uniquely attuned to the ways that it reflected American realities and uniquely qualified to be its judge. "More than anyone else, he first identified rock as a politically and socially evocative form of music that would change our world," he said. Mick Jagger, among the greatest beneficiaries of Wenner's particular judgment, added, "Jann almost single-handedly pioneered the idea of popular music and rock and roll in particular as a vibrant art form not just a collection of flash-in-the-pan mediocrities." Perhaps Wenner did change the world but it kept on spinning, and when the asteroid struck, every subsequent decision he made carbon-dated him.
Wenner, who, for decades, oversaw the publication that established the world we now know as classic rock, has made himself the subject of ire while promoting his upcoming book, The Masters, which features conversations between Wenner himself and a few hand-picked artists: Jagger, John Lennon, Bono, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. If you're noticing a pattern, that's part of the problem. When pressed,in conversation with David Marchese for The New York Times, on the exclusion of Black and women geniuses, Wenner defended the decision by saying none of the women he encountered while at the magazine were "articulate enough"; ditto for Black artists like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield. Wenner, who stepped down as chairman of the Rock Hall nominating committee in 2019, was removed from the Hall's board of directors shortly after the comments. His is a particular privilege: To still be in the Hall despite being complicit in denying so many artists far more deserving. He is, rightfully, being skewered from all angles, but Wenner is, and always has been, merely an avatar for a crumbling framework.
Wenner saying the quiet part out loud is a demonstration of how white male gatekeepers have stymied women artists and artists of color, up to the highest reaches of the most influential music magazine in American history, and within the inner circle of those who get to decide what music is enshrined. But this crude perspective had long been made baldly and painfully evident by his editorial decisions at the helm of said magazine and as the chairman of the Hall. Though warranted, they overlook several more important questions: Why is the Rock Hall the American public's most widely recognized canon for popular music? Are its practices even in the best interest of preserving art? Moreover, is such a canon even needed?
To understand the Rock Hall's vision, it is first important to understand its founding, and that it was built primarily by esteemed executives in a highly segregated music business, the kind of white men that 2015 inductee Bill Withers once referred to as "blaxperts" (self-proclaimed interpreters of Black culture socially removed from its community), with emphasis on competition and consecration. When Ertegun convened the key players — Seymour Stein of Sire Records, the entertainment attorney Allen Grubman and Wenner — he pitched them something akin to Cooperstown, the Baseball Hall of Fame. The initial ceremony, in 1986, was constructed around a lavish, exclusive black-tie dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, $1000 a plate, according to famed critic Robert Hilburn.
With competition and elitism in mind, the selection process was cemented, and since then the system and its players have remained shrouded in secrecy. What we do know: Artists become eligible 25 years after their first recording. A nominating committee of 30 execs, lawyers and critics decide the yearly field of about 15 artists before another, larger committee chooses the final set of inductees. This kind of voting is common for award ceremonies. The Tony Awards have even smaller committees, but are much more transparent aboutwho is participating. Award shows like The Grammys have categories, which, theoretically, makes the criteria more straightforward. Though genre categories get murkier every year, there is at least some understanding of what kind of thing should be nominated for the best album in each genre, and the existence of multiple categories should allow for coverage of the sprawl. There are longstanding questions about not only what is "rock" enough for the Rock Hall but also about what, exactly, qualifies an artist for inclusion. And while the purpose of an award ceremony and its show is to reward individual excellence and entertain, the Rock Hall has loftier objectives — not simply to honor but to immortalize.
Despite frequent protests to the contrary, the kind of artists that the Hall chooses to immortalize come from within Wenner's narrow field of vision. Just as in rock itself, racism and sexism have been ugly blemishes on the rock press, and on Rolling Stone in particular, through its storied history. (It's interesting that he did not see the irony of granting the "masters" distinction to white practitioners of a Black-born art.) Inan oral history of the women who transformed the magazine into a professional operation, former editor Barbara Downey Landau noted that there was a sign over the desk of Wenner's secretary that said "Boys' Club," and a Black photographerdidn't shoot a cover until 2018. In Joe Hagan's Wenner biography, Sticky Fingers, former Rolling Stone publisher Claeys Bahrenburg summarized Wenner's ideals in the disco heyday of the late '70s: "Every day it was strictly rock-and-roll white bands. He would no more put a black person on the cover than a man on the moon." At the Rock Hall, these tendencies resurfaced. (Wenner once said Rolling Stone owned the Hall.) When he stepped down in 2019, he told theTimes, "People are inducted for their achievements. Musical achievements have got to be race-neutral and gender-neutral in terms of judging them."
Wenner's comments and his subsequent expulsion from the Rock Hall come in the wake of significant criticism of the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame Foundation's practices in recent years, and a public reevaluation of its canonizing. "If so few women are being inducted into the Rock Hall, then the nominating committee is broken," longtime Hall critic Courtney Love wrote in a March op-ed forThe Guardian. "If so few Black artists, so few women of colour, are being inducted, then the voting process needs to be overhauled. Music is a lifeforce that is constantly evolving — and they can't keep up."
The following month, one woman voting for Rock Hall inductees, Allyson McCabe (who contributes to NPR), echoed those sentiments in a very public resignation from the Foundation.Writing for Vulture, she called her invitation tokenism, adding that the process was opaque and the methodology seemed, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, biased and preferential. "I felt uneasy looking at the ballot each year, the way the genre's definition seemed to be applied differently in the bios depending on who was doing the rocking. Implicitly, the 'real' rockers were still white guys with 'real' rock instruments," she wrote.
With all of this condemnation swirling, it's worth wondering what about enduring monuments like the Rock Hall keeps stirring people up. It's easy to understand why artists care — if not for the sake of hagiography then for the approval — but what about us in the audience? If the thing is so broken, why do we continue to concern ourselves with the way it functions, or the results of its dysfunction? There is a very human impulse to not only have others endorse the music we enjoy but to have its impact dignified in a way that feels meaningful. That goes even more so for music we believe expresses something profound about the human condition. We see it year after year with the Grammys, in various cycles of outrage: a need to see institutions validate our taste and its effect on the way we see our world, and, by extension, an equally powerful need to satiate our desire to argue. There is no version of the Hall that can be unanimously agreed upon. And even though we know it's busted we don't really know how to fix it. That's because you can't build a Hall without diminishing the impact of music that someone, somewhere finds sacred.
To build a Hall with only superiority as the defining principle is to misrepresent what art is for. It is something that makes sense for sports, which are defined by quantifiable metrics like wins and statistics, but not for music, which is incalculable. Music is something you feel and we already have a system for attempting to measure the music that is most popular for posterity: the Billboard charts. Some of Rolling Stone's own attempts at canonizing have shifted with its public (I was among the musicians, industry insiders and critics that voted for the updated Rolling Stone 500), as have the Rock Hall's, demonstrating the slippery notion of any sort of definitive music valhalla.
There is a more attractive version of the Rock Hall that puts the museum before the haut monde, making itself out to be a curator of watershed moments from an important but specific period in rock history and not an authority on all of history. In that case, the Hall's definition of rock can be whatever its committees want it to be, and the doors open more broadly to artists with a subtler impact. Instead, the Hall and its cabal want to have it both ways — venerate only what suits them but define American music's legacy for everyone.
Somehow, despite the Hall's objections to certain kinds of music, it has become cultural orthodoxy as popular music's pantheon, a distinction it has leaned into consistently. In 2022, Dolly Partonasked to be removed from the ballot because she felt she wasn't a fit. In response to her request, the Hall shared a broader mission statement: "From its inception, rock and roll has had deep roots in rhythm & blues and country music. It is not defined by any one genre, rather a sound that moves youth culture. Dolly Parton's music impacted a generation of young fans and influenced countless artists that followed. Her nomination to be considered for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame followed the same process as all other artists who have been considered."
If its goal truly has been to canonize a genreless sound that moves youth culture, the Rock Hall has resoundingly failed. Its considerations of R&B, country, pop and hip-hop have always felt warped. What's more, beyond its marked inability to define rock's relationship to other genres, the Rock Hall has done very little to make them feel at home and not like outliers. Nevertheless, it positions itself as a holistic institution that should be regarded as sacred. In truth, it was built to do exactly what it does: omit and disallow..."
You developed personal friendships with a lot of the people you interviewed in “The Masters.” I’m curious how you think those friendships helped the interviews, and are there any ways in which they hindered them?
By and large, they helped. Because the interviews I did, they’re not confrontational interviews. They’re not interviews with politicians or business executives. These are interviews with artists. They’re meant to be sympathetic, and they’re meant to elicit from the artist as deep as possible thinking that they’re willing to reveal. I think that the friendships were critical. I mean, the example of Mick Jagger — he just didn’t give interviews to anybody, and he still doesn’t. It’s because we were friends, I got him to do it. I had a particular kind of relationship with Bob Dylan. Jerry Garcia, we were old buddies from years ago. So, it really works. The only place it hurt was with Bruce. That was the interview I did for the book, not for the magazine. And my friendship with Bruce is very deep at this point. It makes it difficult to ask questions that you know the answers to. You’re trimming your sails to the friendship.
In the Maureen Dowd profile of you last year, you said that the Rolling Stones look like “Lord of the Rings” characters. Did Mick Jagger give you a hard time about that?
Oh, yeah.
What did he say?
He couldn’t believe I had said that. I had to say, Look, I’m so sorry. I was just, in the pursuit of publicity, trying to be super clever and please forgive me. Of course, he did. But it was one of those careless remarks. A friend shouldn’t say that kind of thing. You don’t want to read it in Maureen Dowd’s thing in The New York Times. Oh, Mick Jagger looks like he’s Gandalf the wizard. He was absolutely right and I felt terrible.
Looking for grammatical stuff, usage stuff; changing a word here and there, if he’d want to use a different word that’s more precise; maybe something was too intimate and he decides he doesn’t want to put it on the public record. I’m happy to do that with these subjects. As I said before, these are not meant to be confrontational interviews. These are profiles in a way. If I have to trade the level of trust that is necessary to get this kind of interview, to let people put a few things off the record, nothing of any value, maybe something about their kids or their family or not wanting to put down somebody. I let John Lennon edit his interview, and everything he said in that interview ——
Oh, is that true? This is a famous interview from 1970. He unloaded his public feelings about the Beatles. But I didn’t realize that you let him edit it.
Yes. He went through, and he made changes here and there. Basically, it’s interview subjects clarifying what they want to say, making it more precise. Because it’s a long stream of yap and verbiage and you sometimes don’t think through every word. I want them to have the opportunity to say precisely what they meant.
I think it’s fair to say that the average reader assumes that what shows up in the publication is basically what was said. But you’re saying, actually the subjects go over the transcripts. And, for example, you got pilloried for reviewing Mick Jagger’s “Goddess in the Doorway,” giving it five stars, when the critical consensus on that album was that it was kind of a dud. The broader question is, when it comes to interviews with the people that you admire, who are also your friends, are you shading into something that’s a little more like fan service, or a kind of branding, than objective journalism?
Look, nothing was ever substantively changed from the original interviews. These are all minor changes that really get to accuracy and readability and all that stuff. Secondly, these were not meant to be confrontational interviews. They were always meant to be cooperative interviews.
Hunter, well, you know, sui generis. Hunter, in fact, was as accurate a reporter as I’ve ever had, but it’s just that his stories went beyond facts, into areas of the truth and spirituality and pharmacology that none of us are really able to judge on our own. My mission always, journalistically speaking, was the truth is the most important thing. As we all know now, if somebody really wants to hoax you, there’s very little you can do about it. Except have the kind of hypervigilance that would mean you could probably publish nothing.
So almost a decade later, there are no lessons that you drew from that experience? In your mind, it’s just wrong place, wrong time? That seems like sort of a glib response.
There are two main things in the story. One was the account of this gang rape given to us by this source, Jackie. That turned out to be a fabrication. Because we didn’t want to identify her, we didn’t demand to meet people to corroborate her story. Our mistake was to let her out of that demand, not wanting to put her through the trauma again. That was one story that ran through the long piece. The other story, having nothing to do with Jackie, was about the handling of rape on that campus by other people — handling rape in general across the country. It was a conscientious, serious attempt to do that issue, and that was like the third piece by that particular individual on sex crimes and one of our second or third pieces about campus rape. So then the hoax was discovered and we lived with the consequence of that. It was one of the most miserable professional experiences I’ve ever had. I don’t mean to be glib about it, but I don’t feel wholly to blame for this, or that it’s some terrible black mark. I think the lesson I learned is, yes, it does happen to everybody. The other thing is, of course, we could have been tighter. So, you know, there’s a series of circumstances. I can’t pull out the hara-kiri knife for that one.
To go back to the book now, in the introduction to the book ——
Am I let off the hook, David? Am I forgiven?
That’s not for me to decide.
History will speak.
History will speak. This is also a history-will-speak kind of question. There are seven subjects in the new book; seven white guys. 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?
Well, let me just. …
Carole King, Madonna. There are a million examples.
When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate. 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.
Oh, stop it. You’re telling me Joni Mitchell is not articulate enough on an intellectual level?
Hold on a second.
I’ll let you rephrase that.
All right, thank you. It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. 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.
Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? 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.
How do you know if you didn’t give them a chance?
Because I read interviews with them. I listen to their music. I mean, look at what Pete Townshend was writing about, or Jagger, or any of them. They were deep things about a particular generation, a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock ’n’ roll. Not that the others weren’t, but these were the ones that could really articulate it.
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?
