Jann Wenner, the bilious Rolling Stone founder, is sure he knows genius when he sees it. His new book is a collection of interviews he conducted with seven gods of rock, all of them white and male. To promote this book, Wenner gave a lengthy interview to David Marchese of the New York Times. Unfortunately for Wenner, who admitted to Marchese that he often allowed subjects like John Lennon and Bono to edit their own interviews to gut unflattering material, Marchese granted no such privilege. Wenner was on the record in all his racist and misogynistic glory. Black and female artists were not Wenner’s “zeitgeist” despite Rolling Stone’s formative years overlapping with an explosion of Black and female musical talent in the United States, from Marvin Gaye to Joni Mitchell to Carole King to Jimi Hendrix to Sly and the Family Stone. “Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” Wenner declared. “It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. 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 was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test.”
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