THE ROCK AND Roll Hall Of Fame has fired co-founder Jann Wenner following an interview with The New York Times in which the 77-year-old disparaged black and female artists. Wenner was promoting a book called The Masters, which collates a selection of his interviews for Rolling Stone magazine. When challenged about the fact that it featured just white males, Wenner commented that women were not “articulate enough on this intellectual level”, and that Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield were unable to communicate their musical “genius” as well as Bono, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend – the so-called “philosophers of rock”. Wenner later apologised “wholeheartedly” for what he termed “badly chosen words”.
“The very idea of a book called The Masters which blatantly omits people of colour and women [suggests] a much larger and more systematic problem,” said a statement from the band Living Colour. “To hear that Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner or any of the women that he chooses not to mention are not worthy of the status of ‘master’ smacks of sexist gatekeeping and exclusionist behaviour.”