Racist was a Rolling Stone…
Jann Wenner is precisely what White Supremacy looks like in print and in living color….
My first love when it comes to music will always be and always has been Hip Hop. With that, I also have a deep love for Rock n Roll. In fact, before I ever heard a Hip Hop record, it was rock music that inspired me. Growing up in rural New Jersey, a small town in the Northwestern county of Sussex, I was exposed more to Huey Lewis and the News, Tom Petty, and Creedence Clearwater Revival than Run DMC and LL Cool J, at least at first. By the time I entered High School in 1991, I was much more than a Hip Hop head listening to it, and buying it, I was writing raps, performing and well on my way to becoming a professional artist. I wanted to read any and everything I could get my hands on about Hip Hop, it didn’t matter where it was, or what it was about. That was also true however for Rock n Roll. Before Lupe ever thought of Kick, Push I was a dungaree, converse chuck all star wearing alternative rap kid, as much into Big Daddy Kane as I was into Veruca Salt. My video game sessions had a mix of Tribe, Rage Against the Machine and Nirvana. My first group when I was 15 was “Futant Reality” a rock trio I fronted with my aggressive Zach De La Rocha inspired rhyming. My holy bible when it came to interviews, reviews and general news around the Rap world was obviously, “The Source” but similarly it was Rolling Stone when it came to Rock.
In format, Rolling Stone was more VIBE though than the Source. Its long reads were more essays and dissertations than simply articles. And I loved it! There was a time when I had boxes of magazines and those two specifically, The Source and Rolling Stone I collected the most. Rolling Stone brought me closer to the mythical Rock gods I would listen to in my Sony Walkman or watch their videos on MTV. It was in the beginning of my twenties when I understood not the whole story was being told inside my magazine of choice. At this point even the most casual of fans know Rock started from and in the black community. Those roots are traced all the way back from the Blues, and whether it was Chuck Berry, or Rosetta Tharp and tens of others names that could fill this entire article it's taken decades to get the story (sorta) right. If you ask any of the aforementioned “masters” that Jann Wenner recently touted in his new book, they would point to B.B. King, Leadbelly et. al black blues and rock gods who influenced them, who they out and out stole from and were forever indebted to. It was my own personal education that made me realize Rolling Stone had, just as the music industry had done, whitewashed the truth about who any of us should be giving credit to. Rolling Stone had become the self appointed aficionado not only of the current trends and place to find out about who were the artist of the day to pay attention to, but also the place where the sacred history of Rock could be told.
In this way, it wasn’t a large surprise that in Jan’s most recent interview, the founder of the sacred rag that is Rolling Stone with much hubris openly admitted his white supremacist thinking. Here is the truth, we all have personal biases, especially when it comes to art and music we love. If you were to ask me, hand on heart who the greatest rapper was, I’d probably say Kane or Nas. Rock? Jimi Hendrix. But, that’s how I feel and there is nothing to critically affirm my choices as immutable fact. The other more important part is, I don’t have the means or the influence for my personal choices to affect how a very widespread group understands or thinks about any subject. In this way, Jan’s very wrongheaded and dangerous opinions on what artist has the ability to “deeply articulate” the spirit and ideas of Rock is deeply troubling because of the influence and power that the magazine he helped found has. Its not only the tens of millions of people over decades who prescribed the same importance to Rolling Stone that I had as a teen, but various industry awards and opportunities that look to publications to see who should be elevated and credited. It is a less than virtuous circle, artist validate the publication, the publication reciprocates, the public affirms and it repeats. Jan and his magazine became one of the gatekeepers to legitimacy and in his own words, if you werent white and male, you just werent on the same level.
Many times, when people hear or see the words white supremacist, a towering figure with a white hood appears, or a bald headed youth in doc martens shouting and cursing while giving a nazi salute, or in the modern day a couple of clean cut white kids in dockers and polo shirts marching with Tiki torches. Actually, what White Supremacy is, is the ability to degrade, devalue, de-emphasize and destroy anything or anyone who is not considered white. White Supremacy creates an illusion that the pinnacle of all things is white. That nothing can be as good, as strong, as pure, as influential or as articulate as what it produces. Then, it goes a step further and actively cements that power through re-writing and re-shaping history based upon its own subjective and biased opinion. White Supremacy creates institutions, laws and even publications that ensures it becomes the standard bearers and the last word on anything and everything. White Supremacy is more than singular action or thought but a conscious construction of an ideal that can be widespread, replicated and enforced by any and all means.
In Jan Wenner, we found that a white man decided that the truth was, the only real musicians of worth, and the generation of worth looked like him, talked like him, and were his friends. Everything else, secondary, and in fact not even important or worthy of mention. The most horrific thing is, he had the means and the desire to build a “journalistic” empire to push that very idea, a publication that became the very tome of Rock Music. If we all could be so lucky. Thankfully, the truth is out there and even though it is still not readily and consistently referenced or presented the annals of history show us who really were the masters in Rock n Roll. The only thing that Jan ultimately has accomplished in his career and his legacy is to remind the rest of the world how deeply rooted, pervasive and resilient White Supremacy is. It lives in every institution public or private, commercial or otherwise and is still very much active and at work. Thanks Jan, for the reminder.
