Rolling Stone Founder Faces Backlash For Bigoted Remarks, Ousted From Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

In an interview with The New York Times, Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone founder and co-founder of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, tried to justify why his new memoir, The Masters, a collection of interviews he’s conducted over the years, only featured white men.

During the Times interview, Wenner was asked why he didn’t interview women or Black musicians.

“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 Mitchell] was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test,” he told The Times.

The list of artists he’s interviewed include Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Pete Townshend, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and Jerry Garcia — all white men.

“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. “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.”

This caused significant backlash, and Wenner issued an apology on Sept. 17 through his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, Variety reported.

“In my interview with The New York Times I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks,” Wenner said. “‘The Masters’ is a collection of interviews I’ve done over the years that seemed to me to best represent an idea of rock ’n’ roll’s impact on my world; they were not meant to represent the whole of music and its diverse and important originators but to reflect the high points of my career and interviews I felt illustrated the breadth and experience in that career.”

Still and all, Wenner was voted out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The organization had already voted to have him removed from its board of directors by the time Wenner’s apology went public.

According to TMZ, music critic Jon Landeau was the only person who voted in favor of keeping Wenner on the board despite his ill-informed comments.

Evelyn McDonnell, a Loyola Marymount journalism professor and expert on music, gender, and politics, criticized Wenner’s larger body of work, writing on Facebook, “This interview with Jann Wenner. This is why I wrote ‘The Feminine Critique’ in 1991. This is why Ann K. Powers and I edited ‘Rock She Wrote’ in 1995. This is why I started reporting on the Rock Hall’s gender inequity in 2011. This is why I edited ‘Women Who Rock’ in 2017. Thank you David Marchese for calling this unapologetic bro to task for his decades of sexism and racism that have resulted in so many false ‘master’ narratives about music history. Not to mention unethical journalism.”