toomanyhatz
god
I've met him/her. He/she's great!!
Posts: 3,242
|
Post by toomanyhatz on Sept 18, 2023 18:10:00 GMT
Schadenfreude, my friend. Schadenfreude.
Just like he has every right to declare himself immune, I have every right to enjoy it when he shoots himself in the foot.
I am, of course, well aware that he's not really getting any kind of comeuppance, and will walk away with his smirk and his millions. Hope Mick enjoys the blowjob next time.
|
|
|
Post by adamcoan on Sept 18, 2023 18:14:36 GMT
Lol, yeah, you can have that Hatz. I cannot say I am particularly enamoured by him.
|
|
|
Post by davey on Sept 18, 2023 18:30:48 GMT
There’s just a weird “garbage in/garbage out” aspect to all of this…
Wenner wants to be the guy who chooses who “the masters” or philosophers of rock and roll are. He defends his specific choices by arguing that he can’t find anyone else able to communicate and the same level. This can be debated, but ultimately it boils down to him valuing their perspective more.
Someone like Chuck D is every bit as capable of philosophizing as Bruce Springsteen. But maybe Wenner doesn’t want to hear, “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.” He might not consider that kind talk interesting. But perhaps the lack of it leaves us with a false consensus about the meaning of it all.
There’s a kind of attention that has been paid to the guys he has chosen throughout their careers that female and black artists could never take for granted. So perhaps the philosophical nuggets don’t flow as easily from them. But Wenner doesn’t even seem to believe that it’s worth the effort to try.
|
|
|
Post by adamcoan on Sept 18, 2023 18:36:25 GMT
White rich guys don't really want to know if you want to 'fight the power'
Then again, as I always say , the voices of the ghetto and the project poets always end up in white leather heaven with wonderful views of the canyon and a fish tank built into every wall.
|
|
|
Post by davey on Sept 18, 2023 18:43:04 GMT
I mean, at some level, if you’re interviewing people who have had worldwide success in any field, you’re going to end up getting the rich-person’s perspective no matter what you do.
|
|
|
Post by adamcoan on Sept 18, 2023 18:50:09 GMT
I mean, at some level, if you’re interviewing people who have had worldwide success in any field, you’re going to end up getting the rich-person’s perspective no matter what you do. In a nutshell.
|
|
|
Post by Reactionary Rage on Sept 18, 2023 19:07:58 GMT
Wenner’s crime is that he has sinned according to the progressive faith by not including women or black people in some stupid, pointless exercise nobody with a life gives a shit about.
What does Matt Wilson think?
|
|
|
Post by davey on Sept 18, 2023 19:44:50 GMT
No. His “crime” is defending his selections by arguing that all black and female artists lacked the philosophical chops for inclusion.
|
|
|
Post by Stacy Heydon on Sept 18, 2023 21:19:48 GMT
I haven't read the original interview, and maybe I should do that before commenting, but this is my take so far. It was an incredibly boneheaded thing to SAY... but thinking about the people in his book, and the people NOT in his book that he mentions, all of whom I've read interesting interviews with (except maybe Curtis Mayfield - I don't think I've ever read a Curtis Mayfield interview)... it seems to me he was going for a particular kind of thing with his book. All of the people in his book (that he mentioned), even fucking BONO, have spoken at length and in some depth about the power of music/rock & roll, about what it does and how it does it. And I can't remember Joni Mitchell or Marvin Gaye or Grace Slick or Stevie Wonder ever doing that, as such. (Maybe they just were never asked the right questions?) So yeah, it was a really stupid thing for him to say the way he said it, and yeah, the book has a stupid title, but I think that's where he was coming from. For the record, I have no great love for Jann Wenner and don't particularly wish to be his apologist, but that's just how it looks to me. On a substantive level, you could argue this a lot of ways. He may be entirely right that only a handful of white men of a certain vintage are apt to pontificate in a way he’d find satisfying about the meaning of rock and roll. But the lack of other perspectives IS telling. If only a certain kind of person is gonna uphold your narrative, perhaps that narrative isn’t as universal as you think. But he has a right to write a shitty book, so go with Bono. Fine by me. What does him in is the utter dismissal he voices about the black and female artists he cites. The “go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest” shit and the “they didn’t articulate at that level” shit. "They didn't articulate at that level" isn't even good grammar! There is a certain irony in a guy commenting on the intellectual prowess of others who can't even explain what he means with any eloquence or clarity. But then a guy who regards Mick Jagger as a "philosopher" isn't exactly going to be any great intellect himself. He's basically a fan boy who is also a good businessman/entrepreneur. He has the kind of narrow tastes and preconceived ideas that a lot of American guys of his generation had.
|
|
loveless
god
Bringing ballet to the masses. Sticking to the funk.
Posts: 2,804
|
Post by loveless on Sept 18, 2023 22:18:30 GMT
The amount of "Fuck Jann Wenner" I'm coming into this with is not inconsiderable.
Has he disproportionately controlled the narrative around "the music" for far too long? Absolutely - so many canards that your average neophyte will spout about the music of the boomers seems to spin directly from his social ambitions and agendas via his various platforms. Joe Hagan's Sticky Fingers makes a lot of this extremely explicit, not that there would have ever been any doubt. To a person who has observed or is interested in how "the paper of record" (as they most certainly were during some crucial narrative setting times in pop music/culture) ground certain axes, gatekept, tilted certain scales (there are countless examples, and...I would imagine that if you care, you know)...'false consensus' is accurate...his work at the Rock Hall has, in essence, been a continuation or a carbonization of his mighty boomer bullshit at Rolling Stone. Again, there are no shortage of stories. For such a transparent "taste in his ass" yacht party ass kisser, his influence on received wisdom (even...take something as small as the Beatles story as an example) has been outsized for decades.
It's 100% natural that he would say the quiet part out loud re: "tokenism" (the day that Joni or Stevie is somehow lesser than Bono...and therefore "tokenism"...again, taste in his ass), because so much of his professional life for the past (say) 30 years has been reluctantly allowing the damage control section of his editorial staff, and other RRHOF board members whom he undoubtedly also considers diplomatically necessary tokenistic evils to...yes, probably practice some VERSION of performative inclusion ("throw PJ Harvey in there for the kids and/or the chicks...Rush is getting a lotta votes...etc.") that means nothing, and is assuredly offered reluctantly and from a place of genuine ignorance.
It's telling that everyone BUT Landau (Springsteen's manager, long time double dipping rockcrit good old boy, assuredly still covers his ears when Zeppelin is playing) unanimously voted him off the RRHOF board.
So...watching him FINALLY step in the flaming bag of shit that he himself placed on his own porch after answering the doorbell?
YEAH, I'm totally fucking here for it.
|
|
|
Post by Stacy Heydon on Sept 19, 2023 12:00:51 GMT
I remember flicking through copies of Rolling Stone in WH Smiths around 1980 and thinking 'wow, they're so out of touch'. I don't know at what point it became so ossified, it probably made some sort of sense in the mid 70s.
|
|
|
Post by fearlessfreap on Sept 19, 2023 12:08:16 GMT
As far as I can remember, by the mid-to late 70's they became clueless. Even after they moved from San Francisco to New York, they were still focusing on San Francisco hippy bands while punk, disco, new wave and heavy metal were happening, and Wenner now had access to celebrities he didn't have in San Francisco. I think he became aware of Andy Warhol's Inteview magazine and liked that direction.
|
|
|
Post by Stacy Heydon on Sept 19, 2023 12:44:50 GMT
As far as I can remember, by the mid-to late 70's they became clueless. Even after they moved from San Francisco to New York, they were still focusing on San Francisco hippy bands while punk, disco, new wave and heavy metal were happening, and Wenner now had access to celebrities he didn't have in San Francisco. I think he became aware of Andy Warhol's Inteview magazine and liked that direction. What was the attitude of other publications like Creem towards them? Were they viewed as the square establishment? Were they sneered at? Just ignored...?
|
|
|
Post by fearlessfreap on Sept 19, 2023 14:51:03 GMT
A lot of the Creem writers like Bangs and Marsh wrote for Rolling Stone. Bangs was fired because he wrote a negative review of a Canned Heat album and the label threatened to pull their ads. I always found this funny because where were they going to go, Newsweek? I assume they must have paid well, and I doubt rock writers made a lot of money.
|
|
|
Post by Charlie O. on Sept 19, 2023 14:55:53 GMT
As far as I can remember, by the mid-to late 70's they became clueless. Even after they moved from San Francisco to New York, they were still focusing on San Francisco hippy bands while punk, disco, new wave and heavy metal were happening, and Wenner now had access to celebrities he didn't have in San Francisco. I think he became aware of Andy Warhol's Inteview magazine and liked that direction. What was the attitude of other publications like Creem towards them? Were they viewed as the square establishment? Were they sneered at? Yes, and yes. Rolling Stone had its moments of clued-in-ness. They did cover punk and post-punk and rap to some degree. I remember that they positively reviewed "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and, earlier, "Academy Fight Song" by Mission Of Burma - those stuck out to me, because they didn't usually bother with singles. Of course, putting artists like that on the cover wasn't going to shift the units, and even CREEM understood that. I remember CREEM putting The Velvet Underground on the cover in 1987 or '88, and me thinking "they must be going under" - which they were.
|
|