If you had asked me before this morning who Jann Wenner was, I’d have guessed that this was maybe someone associated with the Kardashians. Turns out a Jann Wenner is not a Jenner, but rather a looming media figure, but in music media, so this somehow escaped my notice. Wenner is 77 and co-founded Rolling Stone. He has (or will it be, had??) a new book coming out, called The Masters, because I guess no one ever sent him the memo about “master.”
Or any memo, for that matter.
The title is the least of Wenner’s problems. He did a New York Times interview with David Marchese, who quite possibly out-Chotiner’d Chotiner himself. (Isaac Chotiner, the New Yorker interviewer famed for allowing Bad interviewees to hoist themselves by their very own petards.) Wenner’s Masters include, Marchese points out to him, “seven white guys.” (Mick Jagger, etc.) Wenner had evidently included an awareness disclaimer about this in the book, noting that you don’t need to be white to be a rock musician, but that non-white rock stars were “just not in [his] zeitgeist.”
Marchese pushes him on this point, and it becomes clear that if Wenner finds Black rock stars insufficiently articulate (yes, he uses “articulate”), he really doesn’t think women rock stars can string a sentence together, at least not at the level to be “philosophers of rock.”
Here’s where it gets interesting. Marchese tries to tease out the distinction between Wenner having seven favorite musicians who happen to be white dudes, and his declaring specific musicians The Masters.
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?
That was my No. 1 thing. 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.
I am no fan of the thing where, if someone names a handful of their favorite artists, they’re expected to tick every (or any) diversity box. White men—wealthy ones, at that—have historically had more opportunities to become Le Great Artiste than have other people, so if someone does wind up with a Wenner-like list, maybe this is more of a result-of-bigotry thing than a sign that they are, personally, a bigot. (I think I’m only a fan-fan of Victoria Wood, who was white but not a man, so when I write Mistress, you can cancel just the half of me.) However!
First, there’s the way he wavers, in that interview, between saying (and he had every opportunity to say, and it would have or should have absolved him) that these were his subjective faves, and insisting that these were the geniuses the philosophers the masters. That there was some sort of objective “test” he’d given musicians to determine if they’d be included, and only men made the cut, them’s the meritocratic breaks.*
Next, and more substantively, there’s his role as a tastemaker. He’s not an aw-shucks fan, he’s a professional curator. What Wenner was doing here was different from some dork who stays home at night and blogs coming up with a list of which Britbox shows she’s clicked on just before falling asleep.
I find Wenner-types (and I’ve met my share) rather blech, but I’m not sure I love where all of this lands. You wind up with a thing like the Hannah Gadsby Picasso exhibit, wherein there are on the one hand Greats, and on the other, the people who really should have been included, and who, however Great they are, now seem like the vegetables one is trying and failing to feed a toddler.
*Heck, he could have even leaned into the fact that he’s gay—something I learned only in the NYT comments, having never previously considered the sexual orientation of this man whose name only sounded vaguely familiar—and maybe there’s some level at which male musicians reach him on a level female ones don’t! Wouldn’t have helped re: the race bit but it would have been something.