Jann Wenner is a Privileged Jerk Whose Name Should be Erased from the History of Rock and Roll

Controversy has swirled around Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine and cofounder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, since The New York Times published an interview with him on Sept. 15. The key takeaway was his stunningly offensive decision to include only white male rock and rollers in his latest book.  Wenner’s comments wound up getting him booted from the Rock Hall’s board of directors in 20 minutes, and his “apology” isn’t winning him any points either.

When asked about his decision to exclude female and black artists from his book, 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.  The fact that Wenner felt he was safe enough to admit that he believed that Black and female artists, in his estimation, just didn’t “articulate enough” on the same “intellectual level” is incredible. 

For the record, the articulate white men Wenner did laud in his book are Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Peter Townshend, Jerry Garcia, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen.  The funny thing about Jann Wenner‘s foolishness is that Mick Jagger has talked about how he’s been influenced by Black artists, even got his dance moves from Tina Turner, herself. And pretty much everybody in his raggedy book, either stole or learned from Black artists.

Wenner, who was forced out as chairman of the Rock Hall nominating committee in 2019 (for blocking female nominees, according to rumors), was removed from the Hall's board of directors shortly after his outrageous comments.

Iconic Black rockers Living Colour had plenty to say: “For someone who has chronicled the musical landscape for over 50 years, it is an insult to those of us who sit at the feet of these overlooked geniuses. To hear that he believes Stevie Wonder isn’t articulate enough to express his thoughts on any given subject is quite frankly, insulting. To hear that Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner, or any of the many women artists that he chooses not to mention, are not worthy of the status of ‘master’ smacks of sexist gatekeeping and exclusionary behavior."  To add insult to injury, Wenner took his magazine’s name from a song by a Black man, and many of the “masters” in his book are well-known devotees of female and (especially) Black artists.

Wenner’s Rolling Stone magazine has long been criticized for its misogynistic tendencies, as noted by The Guardian.  Feminist critic Ellen Willis refused to write for Rolling Stone, calling it “viciously anti-woman”.  Rolling Stone “habitually refers to women as chicks and treats us as chicks, ie interchangeable cute fucking machines”, read Willis’s comment. Willis, writing in 1970, also said that Wenner’s bias against revolutionary politics fed the oppression of women.  “To me, when a bunch of snotty upper-middle-class white males start telling me politics isn’t where it’s at, that is simply an attempt to defend their privileges. What they want is more bread and circuses,” she wrote.

Despite frequent protests to the contrary, the kind of artists that Wenner and his Hall have choosen to immortalize come from within Wenner's narrow field of vision. In an 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 photographer didn'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'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 for The 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.

“It’s hard not to wonder what music culture and cultural journalism would look like if any of the women at the foundation of Rolling Stone (Annie Leibovitz being the notable exception) had been given proper recognition,” journalist Jessica Harper wrote in her review of Joe Hagan’s “Sticky Fingers,” a book about Rolling Stone’s problematic heyday. ”What would be different today if female artists had been regularly celebrated on Rolling Stone’s cover, rather than misunderstood and even smeared by powerful men in its review pages?”

In fact, after Wenner left Rolling Stone in 2019, the magazine updated its list of the Top 500 Albums of All Time, bringing many more female and Black artists into its top 50.  

According to Jann Wenner's biographer, Joe Hagan, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was an idea stolen by Wenner from its originator in the 1980s & turned into a fiefdom of Rolling Stone. Wenner would laugh to his biz partner that they “fucked” the inventor, Bruce Brandwen, out of it.   got so ensconced in his walled garden, he wasn’t paying attention to what was going on outside. The world changed from under him. He’s supposed to be a newsman who has some kind of standards. Those were not apparent in this interview. But how about curiosity? There’s not a lick of curiosity to this man, which is the saddest thing to me.”  It seems clear that Wenner, a one-time poster child for the counterculture, stopped caring about actual artistry long ago.