This is excellent news for Warren Zevon
“Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder simply cannot meet my extremely stringent aesthetic standards”
In the wake of his staggeringly racist and sexist interview promoting his new book, Only People With Dicks Can Discuss Rock n’ Roll, Jann Wenner has been shitcanned from his gatekeeper role:
Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has been removed from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he also helped found, one day after an interview with him was published in The New York Times in which he made comments that were widely criticized as sexist and racist.
The foundation — which inducts artists into the hall of fame and was the organization behind the creation of its affiliated museum in Cleveland — made the announcement in a brief statement released Saturday.
“Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the statement said. Joel Peresman, the president and chief executive of the foundation, declined to comment further when reached by phone.
While I would have thought he had learned to be less obvious about it, the general sentiments will not be surprising to anyone who has read Sticky Fingers or The Only Girl (both of which I recommend highly.) He’s always been like this:
Wenner left out the part about how some of our great women artists hated him and he only had his old bro-dogs to cull for his book. His book is called The Masters but it's actually just THE MISTERS — the joke writes itself. https://t.co/U1XkelAWhM— Jessica Hopper (@jesshopp) September 15, 2023
Critic and feminist Ellen Willis on Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone, 1970. *Decades* ahead of her time. pic.twitter.com/7GTEHAwOdH— Joe Hagan (@joehagansays) September 15, 2023
And as my colleague observes, Wenner is hardly alone on this:
The Jann Wenner stuff is obviously outrageous, if in keeping with his long held standing as a philistine around this stuff. More important is that these specific attitudes about female songwriters and "articulation" remain very much a critical default in many influential outlets.— The Paranoid Style (@paranoiacs) September 16, 2023
…the punchline:
Wow maybe he should have tried being more articulate https://t.co/ZkVdSY8FkT— andi zeisler (@andizeisler) September 17, 2023