https://www.poetryproject.org/media/pages/file-library/763443671-1666144129/139-newsletter.pdf (Pages 13-14)
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/07/production-of-new-james-brown-film.html
“If I Steal It, Is It Mine?”: Racism, Cultural Expropriation, and the African American Artist in the U.S.
by Kofi Natambu
St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter
New York
December, 1990
--"Cultural Leadership and Cultural Democracy" from The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse, 1967
Amiri Baraka, 1934-2014
(by Amiri Baraka, 1996)
If Elvis Presley/is
King
Who is James Brown,
God?
appropriation: 3. To take to or for oneself; take possession of. To make one’s own. The act of appropriating.
expropriation: 1. To take (property, ideas etc.) from another, especially without his permission. 2. To deprive (a person, business etc.) of property. To be separated from one’s own.
—The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
A critical analysis of the structural relationship between the African American artist and the political economy of culture in the United States must begin with a theoretical investigation of the social and cultural history of aesthetics and “race” in this country. However, the major problem with the teaching of this history is that the writing of it is monopolized by “white Americans” who don’t know anything about the subject.
For example, it is painfully clear that 98% of all the books written about ‘culture’ in the United States don’t have the slightest idea who the following people are or what they’ve “contributed” to American culture: ‘Native Americans (“Indians”), African Americans (“Negroes”), Asian Americans (“Orientals”), Latino Americans (“Hispanics”). As a result these same writers can’t really talk coherently or accurately about the actual historical experience of the Euro Americans (“white people” of English, Irish, Scottish, Italian, French, German and Eastern European descent). Obviously this creates tremendous confusion when it comes to any clear understanding of the complex meaning of these various histories. This is largely because of a profound ignorance of even the empirical details of what the cross-cultural contacts and conflicts of the many heterogeneous groups that make up the North American continent actually represent. Thus it is not surprising that the ideology of racism (the most powerful instrument of oppression in the world today outside of capitalism itself) dominates contemporary discourse about culture, aesthetics and ‘identity’ in the United States.
THE RELENTLESS HEGEMONY that this ideology wields continues to distort, obscure, and confuse the issue when it comes to a critical assessment of the major role that appropriation plays in cultural theory and praxis today. This is no less true within so-called “avant-garde” circles than it is in the academic/institutional oligopoly known as the “cultural mainstream.” In fact, what both of these aesthetic communities have in common is an equal disdain for, yet voracious exploitation of, other cultural ideas, practices, traditions and values stemming from different social/cultural groups (e.g. African Americans). These reactionary attitudes and philosophical limitations constitute the basis of the historical expropriation of black cultural forms in all the arts (i.e. music, dance, literature, visual arts, ‘performance art’, theater, etc.) by white artists and critics who seek to not only use (or appropriate) the techniques, methods and conceptual ideas of African Americans but to co-opt, absorb and consume them as their property through the systematic ‘legal’ and criminal theft of their cultural productions.
This is carried out by the massive structural domination of the art market by huge corporations owned and administered by predominately upper-class white males who, through bureaucratic managerial control, inherited wealth, and monopolistic manipulation of the vast economic network of marketing, distribution and exchange outlets (the various sites of Capital in the political economy of culture in this country as well as globally), determine what the schools and mass media teach about “who did what, when, where and how” when it comes to American cultural history.
There is nothing necessarily conspiratorial or sinisterly “planned” with respect to this on-going condition. It is simply the way things are when it comes to political, economic and social reality in the United States. The fact that the cultural/artistic communities (‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’) largely support and accept the rather heinous status quo only exposes the vested interests of the “art world” when it comes to their own privileged position within the system. So the point is not merely that individual white artists “stole” their own “personal” aesthetic styles (and much of their content) from blacks but that as a necessarily privileged group of artists (by dint of their “race”, class, and sometimes gender) they were able to do much more than merely “appropriate” information (i.e. creatively use thematic and stylistic material as aesthetic source, cultural reference or energy conduit). The truth is that white artists have always sought to own the economic rights to, and residual benefits of, African American cultural artifacts and conceptions. What made this possible for them is the surplus value of what black artists and cultural workers have produced (in the form of usurious “contracts”, absurdly exploitive royalty arrangements and rigidly segregated markets at the points of both material production and exchange).
THE MOST BLATANT and notorious example of all this is the recording industry whose monumental profiteering off the creative genius of such legendary and seminal musicians, composers and singers as Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Theolonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Otis Blackwell, Louis Jordan, Charles Mingus (and just about every blues artist in history) is scandalous. These are just a very few of the huge number of black artists who have revolutionized music as an art form in the 20th century and who have been mercilessly exploited. Who is the great Jimi Hendrix but a man whose extraordinary talent and vision has been plundered by a whole cottage industry of artistic and financial parasites who continue to bilk millions of dollars from his estate, while doing third-rate imitations of his artistry? In this context, who is Eric Clapton? Who are Mick Jagger & Keith Richard? Who is every ho-hum heavy metal guitarist since 1971? What does the multi-billion dollar music industry represent under these conditions? It’s important to note that this is not simply a matter of “trashing” your favorite white musician/songwriter either. After all, I’m not interested in examining the motives or intent of personalities involved in this process. What’s significant is the political, economic and cultural context that they are a part of, and what they decide to do about these conditions as far as their own cultural work is concerned.
In this light it’s easy to see the implications of the infamous “cover song’ tradition of the 1950s and early 1960s by white artists (a situation in which a popular white artist records the song and/or music of a black artist that often results in black artists not being paid royalties for their work and simultaneously being stymied from getting airplay and openly selling their music to a wider audience). Everyone from Pat Boone to Elvis Presley have cashed in on this little strategy. And while the economics and academic recognition of this situation have improved to a certain degree (more people are aware of what is happening and why) it still remains a major concern within the African American cultural community. Just ask the attorneys representing Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the estates of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and yes, James Marshall Hendrix, all of whom are currently involved in massive lawsuits against their respective recording companies. I’m sure there are many more examples.
Another cultural area where this syndrome of white appropriation turns into its ugly linguistic cousin is literature, where three generations of black writers in this century have been ignored, neglected and ripped-off with hardly anyone in academia or the avant-garde batting an eyelash. How else does one explain the colossal ignorance surrounding the important literary contributions of such major ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ writers as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Melvin B. Tolson, Adrienne Kennedy, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Bob Kaufman, Clarence Major, William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Samuel Delany, Gayl Jones, Jayne Cortez, Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, June Jordan, Al Young and even Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (whose towering achievements are far too often dismissed as the infantile rantings of a ‘bitter nigger’). There are many other people I could mention but I think you get the point. How many of you reading this essay have heard of/read Sterling A. Brown, W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James or Ida B. Wells? On the other hand how many of you know the work of W.C. Williams, Norman Mailer, William Faukner, Thomas Pynchon, Ezra Pound, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac? Many more, I’ll bet.
The fault for all this lies of course with the public educational system whose curriculums and policy decisions throughout the country mirror the already established ideology of the bourgeois class that does indeed “run” the nation. The mere fact that the American literary canon is made up almost exclusively of European and white American males makes this clearly self-evident. The expropriation of the oral tradition in ‘American literature’ begins with the poetic and narrative strategies of Thomas Woolfe and William Faulkner in the 1920s and reaches its apex in the Beat Generation poets of the 1950s (check out Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso for starters). Again the issue is not the individuals who choose to use/appropriate material from other traditions and folk forms, but the supporting political economy that promotes and markets their cultural productions as “representative” or “central” to a certain aesthetic expression. At the same time the culture industry ignores or renders invisible the work of the seminal forces in the field.
THIS HISTORICAL DYNAMIC continues today with the myriad innovations in popular dance, painting (graffiti, mural art, etc.), ‘performance art,’ multimedia and film by black artists all being mined by white American artists with scarcely any real critical attention being paid to the nature of their technical and expressive achievements. One very significant example of this is the lack of serious critical analysis and commentary surrounding the powerful new hybrid/synthetic form known as RAP. Most white critics and journalists seem more interested in determining whether young black people inventing the form are “underclass criminals” or simply “obscene illiterates.” This is cultural racism of a particularly insidious and manipulative kind, especially in light of the tremendous popularity (as both form and artifact) that RAP enjoys among middle class white suburban youth (records don’t consistently go double platinum without this demographic audience). The corresponding fact that many white and black scholars are beginning to write in literary and cultural journals about the aesthetics and cultural politics of the form also exposes the dangerously reductive and racist attitudes of such middlebrow publications as Newsweek, The New York Times, New Republic, and The New Criterion. Between the “gliberals” (thanks, Ishmael!) and the neoconservatives, African American art is getting slapped around (and expropriated) from all sides.
But this historical assault on the intellectual and spiritual vitality, creative innovation, and liberating vision of African American art in all its forms cannot and will not stop the contemporary black artist any more than the imitators of Armstrong, Hughes, Hurston, Ellington, Parker, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, Young and Holiday were able to stop their legendary contributions to the 20th century cannon (sic) of world culture. WORD!
Analysis: Jann Wenner's Rock Hall is crumbling — is it worth fixing?
"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..."
This is hardly any kind of revelatory news in any way whatsoever because Jann Wenner was ALWAYS an extremely racist and sexist/misogynist ASSHOLE, JERK, and PRICK like so many others in the "music industry" specifically and the so-called "art world" in general in this country ("then and now" as the saying goes). This is the vile and rancid legacy of pervasive and openly transparent lies, hypocrisy, arrogance, racial and gender hatred, pathological dishonesty, and rank stupidly which always dominated the predominately white and male supremacist cultural milieu of the period that Wenner grew up in and became an abusive and dominant figure of during the 1960s (when the "official dogma" was that Rolling Stone magazine was doing what it claimed to be doing because they genuinely cared about "the rest of us"). That was NEVER true and not only the notoriously fullashit Jann Wenner and his ilk but especially "black people and women" ALWAYS knew it...and still do. After all why do you think Wenner entitled his new book THE MASTERS?
Kofi
Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s
The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine on the legacy of boomers and why he chose only white men for his book on rock’s “masters.”
by David Marchese
September 19, 2023
Listen to the Audio Version of This Interview:
In 2019, Jann Wenner officially left Rolling Stone, the magazine he co-founded in 1967, but he hasn’t left it behind. Since stepping away from the iconic publication, where I briefly worked as an online editor a decade ago, Wenner, 77, has written two books rooted in his time there. The first, a hefty, dishy memoir called “Like a Rolling Stone,” was a best seller after it was published last year. The second, “The Masters,” which will be published on Sept. 26, consists of interviews that Wenner conducted during his Rolling Stone years with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bono and others, as well as a new interview with Bruce Springsteen.
Those interviews — lengthy, deeply informed, insightful — are the kinds of pieces that helped Rolling Stone earn the reputation it held for so long as the music publication. Under Wenner’s guidance, the magazine also developed a reputation as a source of crucial and hard-hitting investigative journalism. But it has taken some reputational hits over the years. Chief among them a widely read investigative piece on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia — which turned out to never have happened.
As befits a man who has been held up as an avatar of his generation’s achievements and failings, Wenner has left behind a complex legacy. But it’s one that he’s happy to defend. Talking to Wenner, who spoke from his home in Montauk, N.Y., I couldn’t help but suspect that he missed the cut-and-thrust of his journalism days. He was very willing, eager even, to engage in discussion about his approach to interviewing his famous rock star friends, his own and his magazine’s possible missteps and what the baby boomers really achieved.
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?
Marchese pushed back on that assertion by citing Joni Mitchell. “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,” said Wenner. “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.”
Wenner said he based that assertion on intuition, reading interviews and listening to 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.”
He said that he could have reconsidered his position and “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.”
Not long after the story was published this morning, many readers (including many journalists) took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to criticize Wenner’s stance.
@SopanDeb
This interview with Jann Wenner is a grab bag of outrageous, unethical journalist practices that would get almost every reputable journalist fired.
Wenner proudly admits to letting sources read and edit interviews before publishing them.
Wenner and Marchese also had an exchange about the former’s admission that he allowed his subjects to edit the transcripts of their interviews, an unethical practice in journalism. Wenner defended the practice, saying that his interviews are “meant to be sympathetic” and revelatory discussions with artists, not politicians or business executives.
“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,” Wenner said. “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.”
Speaking of putting down others, Wenner said he apologized to Jagger following a New York Times profile last year during which he told Maureen Dowd that the Rolling Stones rockers look like Lord of the Rings characters. “He couldn’t believe I had said that,” Wenner said of Jagger. “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.”
PHOTO: Jann Wenner Cindy Ord/Getty Images
