In 2020, I was a guest on the Who Cares About the Rock Hall? podcast, discussing why one of my favourite bands, Labelle, should be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were certainly deserving: they sang socially conscious songs from a Black woman’s perspective, espoused a philosophy that reflected the intersectional politics of Black feminists such as the Combahee River Collective, and sported a space-age look now celebrated as an expression of Black futurism.
The problem was that I didn’t know how to articulate Labelle’s significance in terms that made sense for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Labelle only had one big hit, Lady Marmalade, an ode to a Creole sex worker; the group’s most direct influence has been multiple covers of Lady Marmalade that have almost no connection with the group’s radical politics and style. I just didn’t see how I would be able to translate the group’s importance to the type of people who vote for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, meaning the mostly white men who historically have voted to induct artists who are white men, partly because of the way they’ve influenced other white men.
I thought about this podcast moment again when I read the comments of Rolling Stone magazine founder and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame co-founder Jann Wenner, in the New York Times. In his forthcoming book The Masters, Wenner compiles his interviews with seven rock musicians, all white men, “philosophers of rock,” as Wenner calls them. But Black musicians, he said, “just didn’t articulate at that level” and Joni Mitchell also “didn’t, in my mind, meet that test”. The likes of Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend expressed, he said, “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.”
He later apologised, saying “I totally understand the inflammatory nature of badly chosen words”, ones that “don’t reflect my appreciation and admiration for myriad totemic, world-changing artists”. But his earlier comments linger, confirming as they do the unspoken biases I have experienced in the world of music criticism since entering the field as a Black gay man in the 90s.
When Wenner created Rolling Stone in 1967, it reflected the sentiments he spoke of in the New York Times. As Joe Hagan writes in Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine: “It was a men’s magazine, though women read it; it was a white magazine, though African Americans were fetishised in it.” White men were the focus; women and Black people were secondary thoughts and objects of fascination rather than subjects in their own right.
Some were critical of the magazine’s perspective almost from the very beginning. Feminist rock critic Ellen Willis, who viewed Rolling Stone as apolitical and “viciously anti-woman,” wrote in a 1970 letter: “When a bunch of snotty, upper-middle class white males start telling me that politics isn’t where it’s at, that is simply an attempt to defend their privileges.” Jazz great Miles Davis once said he liked Rolling Stone, “but the last time I saw it, they had all white guys in it.”
The success of Rolling Stone encouraged other magazines and daily newspapers to cover “the rock beat,” creating a professional class of rock critics and editors working according to critical standards largely set by Wenner and his followers. Wenner’s views aren’t just personal confessions: they expose his foundational biases that may have influenced writing about popular music for nearly 60 years.
The damage this may have caused is incalculable. Think of all the Black and female musicians whose careers may have been cut short because their work wasn’t valued by Rolling Stone or by the many writers who adopted Wenner’s views about race, gender and artistry. Think of all the Black and female musicians whose stories weren’t preserved for posterity because certain book editors believed that only white male artists were important and only books about white male artists would sell because the audience for music books is the same as the target audience for Rolling Stone.
What’s needed at this moment isn’t just Wenner’s excoriation and ousting from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though that has happened. We need a complete rethinking of the criteria by which artists are deemed important, influential, and relevant, especially since many of the critics and editors who were trained by or influenced by Wenner are still working in journalism and book publishing.
In 2004, critic Kelefa Sanneh attempted to address this issue in The Rap Against Rockism. He wrote: “Rockism means idolising the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionising punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncer.” Sanneh’s critique helped birth what some call “poptimism”, which, as critic Chris Richards describes it, “contends that all pop music deserves a thoughtful listen and a fair shake, that guilty pleasures are really just pleasures, that the music of an Ariana Grande can and should be taken as seriously as that of a U2.”
There is now a cadre of younger music writers devoted to documenting the true breadth of musical expression. The problem is that poptimism’s impulse to flatten the landscape fails to acknowledge how rocky the ground still is: how sexism and racism underpins the way many women and Black artists remain more embraced in the world of pop than rock. The only way to move the conversation forward – and reclaim any potential music criticism has to incite social change – is by fighting sexism and anti-Blackness with the same openness that Wenner revealed it. Otherwise, this whole controversy will just prove to be yet another moment of performative outrage that leaves the status quo unchecked.
