Welcome to Jann Wenner's Wonderful White World of Wonder!

Acting "surprised" should not even be an option here.

“It’s got a beat + you can really DANCE to it!”

There’s not been a time within recent memory that the establishment music coverage has not been full of shit. Maybe with a brief edit that sentence could be tightened. Here let’s try this: “there’s not been a time within recent memory that the establishment has not been full of shit.”

In actual fact the first wake up call that this was the case was under the helmsmanship of Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone magazine back when it was decided that music that was not considered commercially viable would not be covered. Commercially viable. A dog whistle to establishment players.

“Nothing we hate worse than a ‘yes’ man, isn’t that right Jann?”

“That’s right boss!”

So it went that in the 1970s when rock was roiling with whatever would soon come to be called punk rock, Wenner, and his music journal of note, were already taking a knee. Which was just fine by the last generation of folks who were surprised at suchlike behavior on the part of the supposed left. There were lots of other pubs to fill the void so in that way Wenner had done us all a tremendous favor. And it stood thusly: do not cover music that you don’t like.

I guess he [Keith Richards] had at one time dumped on disco too. Right before he scored “Miss You” a Rolling Stones song I first heard on the dance floor at Studio 54.

In other words we’d rather you tap out, then to not tap out and cover it poorly. “It” in this instance being punk rock, the early strivings of hip hop, post-punk, hardcore and underground metal. You see if you’re big on authenticity having Wenner step aside was probably precisely what he should have done.

Until you start following the money. And while the rest of us could go elsewhere what did this mean when the labels, establishment to the core, stayed right where Wenner assured them he would be: front and center in selling slop to those somewhat committed to musical culture.

“They’re thinking they’re are going to pull their ads.”

The speaker was Val Pippin, VP at California Music Player, the former publishers of Guitar Player, Bass Player, Keyboard and the pub I helmed, EQ Magazine.

“Who’s ‘they’?” I had just started at EQ and while lots of what I’ve done in life might have warranted notice I couldn’t imagine what I had done in a scant few issues that would have done so.

“Sweetwater,” she said about a massive music instrument company. Massive, as in British Petroleum massive.

“Why?”

“They say that the magazine has gotten too urban [emphasis mine].”

I rolled my eyes. Will I Am had been on the first cover. Thievery Corporation had been on the second. And the third cover had sported the still very white producer Jack Joseph Puig. He of Amy Grant, Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross fame.

“Urban.”

In the end they chose to not pull their ads since Pippin called them on “urban” and they assured her race had nothing to do with it. However, in my experience, when it is claimed that race has nothing to do with something it always seems that race very much has something to do with something.

A point that was perfectly placed when Jann Wenner claimed that his curation of his new book that interviews a variety of rock greats and featured no one of color or without a penis, was purposeful and directed. Moreover, in his experience he went on to explain, he had never met a person of color or without a penis who was able to be philosophically articulate about the musical art they made. This was not racial, Wenner suggested. Just: a fact.

In fact his fact is a racial fact that goes back to the original concept of race music and continues up through Pat Boone, the Osmonds, the Disco Sucks era and a Keith Richards quote of Sunday, September 23, 2023 wherein he claims to not like hip hop because he’s never liked people “shouting at me.”

But Wenner as a gate keeper for decades made decisions monthly that reified all that was understood and not spoken: fuck Black music. And fuck them broads too.

I guess he had at one time dumped on disco too. Right before he scored “Miss You” a Rolling Stones song I first heard on the dance floor at Studio 54. Where you could often find his singer, Mick Jagger. (Studio 54 that also didn’t let Nile Rodgers in one night prompting his Chic song, “Le Freak”. A song I later heard on the disco floor as well.)

In the same way that the only country that could really hold its head high in light of the Nazis depredations against Jews would be Denmark where the king refused to segment out the Jewish population with the wearing of Magen David patches, instead ordering them for the country’s entire population, the only mainstream voice of dissent I recall hearing in the last few decades belonged to David Bowie.

In the early days of MTV, Bowie was the only one to brace a hapless (and smirking) VJ to ask why they didn’t have videos with people of color in them. Bowie, he of the sieg heiling Thin White Duke era, was a conveyor of conscience and called them on it. Run DMC and Aerosmith did to a certain degree as well, cross-pollinating in a sort of send up of what was understood but not spoken: there was white music and there was black music and never the twain should meet.

But Wenner as a gate keeper for decades made decisions monthly that reified all that was understood and not spoken: fuck Black music. And fuck them broads too. Unless the broads have nice cans. A weird stance to take for a man who later in life had come out as gay after 26 years of marriage to a woman.

These artists who he was suggesting we not fuck, the ones in his book mostly, though their pedigree was knee deep in the music they had stolen/borrowed from, were somehow worthy because they could be articulate about how they stole what they stole. So much so, perhaps, that we could all forget that they stole it in the first place.

Bono, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen et al, the Alfred E. Neuman’s at the center of this whole imbroglio — “what? Me, worry?” — have been amazingly silent now, which in the case of the dead Lennon makes some sense, but little else does. Surely their record collections include some of their nonwhite, non-male colleagues that might be long overdue for notice.

Thusfar, silence.

Outside of bleating from the Wenner corner regarding free speech and some hand-wringing regarding cancel culture.

Maybe I could get a better informed white cat to help me with this. Maybe Tom Cruise, fresh off of his turn as Tupac Shakur in the Where My Bitchez At? urban biopic could help.

However when you look at the amount of work Mel Gibson, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle and others are still getting, calling bullshit on Wenner’s bleat is only the start. In a restorative sense if we’re casting around what can and should be done to undo what Wenner has done, any and all solutions seem aggressively inadequate. He’s been kicked off of the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a move and an institution dubious in equal measures.

He’s issued half assed apologies. However, him apologizing for shitting on who he’s shitting on makes about as much sense as him apologizing for breathing. He spoke where others have been silent and as a person of color who has made music for public consumption since 1980, I think he’s just given skin to what’s never not been true. Justice is still “just us” and an expectation that things should be any different is just dreamscaping.

Which is why it gives me great pleasure to announce that OXBOW has been nominated for a Grammy in the new-ish Best New Rock Performance category. For our song “Lovely Murk”. Win or lose, I’m hoping here I can manage to be articulate about it, the song’s Schubert quote, as well as the participation of Kristin Hayter who, though I’m unsure she has the kinds of cans that would please a tastemaker like Jann Wenner, kills it from every artistic measure available.

Yeah. Maybe I could get a better informed white cat to help me with this. Maybe Tom Cruise, fresh off of his turn as Tupac Shakur in the Where My Bitchez At? urban biopic could help. Well, I guess it wouldn’t really hurt to ask. I mean what other choice do I have really?

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