Opinion: Why Jann Wenner got kicked out of the hall of fame he helped create

Editor’s note: Gene Seymour is a critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @GeneSeymour. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

Jann Wenner’s expulsion this weekend from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation feels like a moment of reckoning, not just for the co-founder and longtime publisher/editor of Rolling Stone magazine, but for a whole era of pop culture — and how the history of that era is presented.

If you’re just tuning in, an interview with Wenner — who helped establish the Cleveland-based hall of fame in 1983 and was inducted in 2004 as a nonperformer — appeared in Friday’s New York Times. The article aimed to promote Wenner’s new book, “The Masters,” which gathers his interviews with such rock icons as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, the Who’s Pete Townsend, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and U2’s Bono.

At one point in the conversation, Times Magazine columnist David Marchese asked Wenner, 77, why there were no women or people of color among the “masters” in his pantheon. Wenner replied that his selection of artists over the decades was “kind of intuitive” and not “deliberate” and that he didn’t find women rock artists to be “articulate enough” on an “intellectual level.”

Given a chance to rephrase, Wenner said, “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest.” He also didn’t believe Joni Mitchell to be as much “a philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll” as the white men he interviewed.

His comments on Black artists were less direct, but oddly, almost as reductive: “… 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.”

“How do you know,” Marchese asked, “if you didn’t give them a chance?”

“Because I read interviews with them,” Wenner replied. “I listen to their music.”

I find myself asking: Did you? Did you really? Had the opportunity presented itself, I could have steered Wenner to any number of interviews with Black pop artists of the mid-20^th century, from Chuck Berry to Berry Gordy, Ray Charles to Jimi Hendrix.

Not all of them were easily forthcoming and may have needed to be drawn out. But don’t you think the editor-in-chief of the world’s most influential rock-and-pop magazine could have pried open even someone as evasive and recalcitrant as Michael Jackson? Or Prince? Good God, man! Have you read some of Quincy Jones’ recent Q&As? He’d tell you just about anything you want to know — and more!

And no, I never had a chance to have small talk with Joplin or Slick, though I remember enough of their TV talk show appearances from the late 1960s to have found them funny and articulate about themselves and their work. Mitchell’s savviness about not just rock, but also folk, jazz and classic pop idioms are available in many forums. All you need to do is look, and the internet makes looking easier than ever.

Anyway, moot point. Wenner’s comments were regarded as racist and sexist, and he was voted off the board he helped create. Mortifying, for sure. But also illuminating, especially to those of the boomer generation who came of age with Rolling Stone and at various times in their lives, embraced it as a bellwether of the zeitgeist and, as with most mass circulation magazines, a marker for consensus.

Mass media has been reeling for at least the last 30 years from fissures in consensus opinion. If Wenner’s pantheon of rock gods doesn’t sync with your own, well, yours isn’t going to jibe with mine or anybody else’s.

If you want to know just how fragmented things are, just go on your social media platform of preference and announce, however tentatively or innocuously, that you like any pop artist. Within milliseconds, someone else will not only disagree but also disparage you for even bringing it up. This is the world.

But there was a time when the personal preferences of a Jann Wenner or other media moguls set the table for who was up or down in a hierarchy, culturally or politically. Even disagreeing with the moguls was tantamount to ratifying their importance and made it more challenging to those huddling outside the zeitgeist to be heard, or even noticed.

Eventually, the zeitgeist changed on its own, as hip-hop prevailed over rock ‘n’ roll’s former terrain. Even Wenner acknowledged, in an interview last year promoting his memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” that rock was dead and “it’s not coming back. It’ll end up like jazz.”

But jazz didn’t die, and neither will rock. They persist in places where media moguls have simply stopped looking, while still holding on to devoted fans and attracting curious novices. They go on without the Jann Wenners setting the agendas and establishing hierarchies.

Maybe it’s the impulse to set agendas from insular tastes that’s really on its way out and not the music or the musicians or their legacies that are declining. In short, it’s the masses that are changing because there is no easily definable consensus about anything in a social media universe. Wenner, I would have thought, is smart enough to know that. So maybe it would have been better for him to say his book wasn’t about the ultimate “masters.” Just some guys he happens to think are great.

If Wenner should ever ask me, I’d be glad to track down interviews with Stevie Wonder or Smokey Robinson that he can read. I understand they’re still around somewhere, getting no lack of offers for work and no shortage of accolades.