Wenner a Loser

Jann Wenner just put a whole shoe store in his mouth. 

The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine had been promoting his latest book, "Masters," which is a compilation of Wenner's interviews with seven of the greatest rock and roll performers of all time, such as John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and Bruce Springsteen.  And in case you haven't noticed, they're all white male artists.  Not one woman or person of color is included in this collection of  interviews.

Wenner might have gotten away with it if not, ironically, for an interview he gave to promote his book to David Marchese of the New York Times, who immediately brought up Wenner's disdain for diversity.  When Marchese suggested that he could have at least included an interview with Joni Mitchell, Wenner responded, "It’s not that [female and non-white artists are] 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 and roll. She didn't, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock."

Aside from the obvious obstacle to having a deep conversation with Janis Joplin - she's dead - Wenner came across as being like one of those pompous classical-studies professors who take a self-righteous tone to everything they say.  And just what is a "philosopher of rock," anyway? Someone who expresses the true essence of rock and roll in the music and the attitude.  All right, so maybe Joni Mitchell is too mellow to be a rock and roll philosopher, though no one would say the same about Paul Simon or Jackson Browne.  Certainly, that would mean that black musicians must be qualified to wax philosophical about rock and roll.  Am I right?  I said, am I right?

And when the subject turned to black artists, that's when Wenner really got offensive.  

"You know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?" he said. "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."

Well, excuse me, while I kiss the sky.

Wenner should have stopped there, but he went on to say that artists like Mick Jagger and  Pete Townshend represented "a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock and roll. Not that the others [didn't], but these were the ones that could really articulate it."

So, it turns out, Wenner has never listened to Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, much less Bloodstone's debut album.

And for the icing on the cake, Wenner "conceded" that "just for public relations sake, maybe I should have gone and found one black and one woman artist to include here that didn't measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism."

Wenner has been paying for these comments big time since then.  The Montclair Literary Festival canceled his appearance there while the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board voted to expel him from the group with one vote in favor of keeping him - rock critic turned Springsteen manager Jon Landau. Wenner's new book should hit the bookstores with much less buzz than it had just a couple of weeks ago.

The big surprise about Wenner's attitude is why people are surprised.  Wenner has long been the typical white male Baby Boomer, taking great interest in the music made by those of his own race and gender and little interest in the music of everybody else.  If a female or non-white recording artist got on the cover of Rolling Stone at all when Wenner ran the magazine, it was usually for commercial, not musical, reasons.  (Madonna - no thinking person's idea of a real singing talent - appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone twice in 1989, and most if not all of the cover subjects that year were males.)  Not only is Wenner sexist, he's clearly racist; he once described critic Dave Marsh as having tastes "blacker and weirder" than his own, suggesting that all of those old bluesmen and funk-band leaders were just plain strange.  Please, the strangest thing Maurice White ever did was dress like an Egyptian pharaoh.  Also, George Clinton's blond dreadlocks make him silly.  But they do not make him weird.  (Marsh, for his part, said Wenner treated his own music critics "with contempt.")    

Wenner's only agenda is promoting whom he likes - and whom he's buddies with.  Not only did he try to prevent negative reviews of records of his favorite artists - Greil Marcus got fired for his negative review of Bob Dylan's universally panned Self Portrait album -  he shamelessly promoted artists who were savvy enough to make Wenner their best friend, such as Billy Joel and Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones.  So if you ever wondered why Rolling Stone gave Joel's Storm Front LP - produced by Jones, and including the incomprehensible "We Didn't Start the Fire" - four out of five stars in 1989, there's your answer. 

I don't deny that the artists Wenner cites in his book - especially John Lennon - have been among the most gifted artists who can articulate the true spirit of rock and roll, but white males hardly have had a monopoly on articulating what the music means.  However, white males do have a monopoly on the soft underbelly of rock.   When rock critics, most of whom are white males themselves, compile lists of the worst rock and roll artists of all time, most of those artists are white males - Dave Marsh calls the Grateful Dead "the worst band in all creation," and this is in spite of Kiss and Uriah Heep - with women and people of color getting short shrift. There's only one woman and one person of color on Dave Marsh's and James Bernard's 1994 list of the worst rockers ever, and it's the same person - Linda Ronstadt. Similarly, white men dominate lists of the worst rock and roll records of all time.  The reason for all this is because, since the record business catered to the lucrative market segment of white male record buyers in the 1960s and 1970s, there was more room for their junk than for anyone else's junk. There are spectacularly bad records made by women (Madonna) and people of color (rap), and I'm obviously not afraid to say so and never have been, but in terms of sheer quantity, most of the worst records have been made by us honkies. 

When you look at our track record (no pun intended), we white guys have a very sorry legacy.  Never mind the Grateful Dead - among the psychedelic bands we gave the world were total losers like the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Electric Prunes.  We gave the world heavy metal (I mentioned Kiss and Uriah Heep, and I have to mention also Grand Funk Railroad), we gave the world yacht rock (solo Kenny Loggins), we gave the world soft-headed acoustic rock (America), and we may go to hell for inventing prog and being responsible for Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who had the incredibly stupid idea of mixing Beethoven with Berry.   And that's not even accounting for mediocre corporate rock bands like Loverboy, Toto, Journey, and Kansas, among others.  And, we invented air guitar!  No wonder women and people of color hate us - look what we subjected them to! After "Ventura Highway," "(Welcome To) Heartlight," "Rock and Roll All Nite," and "Hot Girls In Love," we clearly deserve it! 😃 

And I pity any woman of color who's ever had to hear "Karn Evil 9, First Impression (Parts 1 and 2)." 😃 😃

*

As rock and roll entered its twilight years in the early nineties, we honkies felt pretty good about ourselves for all we accomplished musically, but at that same time, a new politically correct revisionist history of the music emerged - a history in which we were put to the rack for all our musical crimes, from Pat Boone's Little Richard and Fats Domino covers and Led Zeppelin stealing riffs from Willie Dixon and Howlin' Wolf to Peter Frampton's I'm In You album and Journey's Escape.  Only we didn't know that we were the bad guys until then.  We thought we were the ones with the taste, the style, the attitude.  It turns out we had more attitude than taste or style, and we made fools of ourselves by believing otherwise.  Remember how Beto O'Rourke, who fancied himself a cool hipster and an edgy but quirky family man, completely immolated himself at the women-of-color group She the People's convention when he couldn't connect with the sistas to justify his sorry excuse of a presidential campaign?  Same thing here.   As with every other act we ever perpetrated in human history, we thought everything we contributed to rock and roll was worthy of universal praise.  Only we found out that a good deal if not most of everything we did in the name of civilization, be it in rock and roll or anything else, was a crime against humanity that we now had to answer for.  And when we found out we were the bad guys, it was, like, the shock of our lives.

And that's how Jann Wenner must feel right now.     

Rage Against Trump

My only problem with the House of Representatives impeaching Trump when it did is that it did it soon.

Thanks to Bob Woodward's latest book, "Rage," which comes out on September 15, there's plenty of proof for impeachment and enough to ensure a conviction in the Senate.

Seems Trump know how bad COVID-19 was back in late January and early February but he didn't want to tell anyone how bad it would get because he didn't want to panic anyone and cause the economy - his only strong suit in the 2020 presidential campaign - to crater.  But it did crater, largely in part because Trump tried to downplay the pandemic, which he continues to do today without embarrassment.  Information he had that could have saved lives and even his Presidency was cast aside for political reasons.

Oh yeah, there's more.  Woodward has assembled numerous indictments of Trump's ability to lead - that is, he has none - from people as diverse as Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and Anthony Fauci.  Especially indicting is Woodward's quote from former Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, writing that Coats "continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that [Vladimir] Putin had something on Trump. . . ..  How else to explain the president's behavior? Coats could see no other explanation."

And, of course, no one can see another explanation either.

Woodward also reveals that Trump's association with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has gone far beyond détente and blossomed into a full "bromance," with Trump gushing over Kim's abilities as a leader and agreeing with him that Barack Obama is a rhymes-with-glass-pole, Trump telling Woodward that Obama is "overrated" as a leader and laughing at the idea that blacks are victims of systemic racism, a belief that Woodward, a privileged white man like Trump, subscribes to.

As does everyone else with a brain.

I hope the election ends with a Biden victory, and I hope the time between now and November 3 passes soon.  I don't think I can take much more. 

And in the meantime, can we impeach Trump again? 

Summer Reading

Trump had been trying to stop it, but John Bolton's new book is going full tilt boogie, and the bombshells are dropping and detonating like napalm-filled incendiary devices, threatening to defoliate Trump's leadership veneer and expose the emperor as having no clothes. 

My, I'm getting poetic here!

In his book "The Room Where it Happened," Bolton has revealed many embarrassing things about the current White House occupant,  For one thing, he asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to by more soybeans and wheat from American farmers to help him win re-election, and he had no problems with Xi putting the Muslim Uighurs of Sinkiang in northwestern China in concentration camps.  Bolton also says that Trump asked if  Finland was a part of Russia (it was, actually, until 1917) was ignorant of the fact that Great Britain is a nuclear power, and has obstructed of justice as easy as breathing.

The Justice Department's attempts to book the book will likely come to nothing, since much of the most damning information Bolton has on Trump is already out.  But Bolton is hardly a hero; he sat on this information and teased about being able to testify in Trump's impeachment trial but held back so as to ensure that these facts would only come out with his book and enable him to make a ton of money.  In which case, I would recommend checking it out of your local library - assuming it's not closed due to COVID-19.  And even if Bolton does make a lot of money from this, his earnings may likely be confiscated if there is any classified information in his book, as the Justice department claims.   

Bolton's failure to come forward during the impeachment trial still has a lot of Democrats angry, but it's better this information about Trump comes out this way than not at all.  And the Democrats can impeach Trump again and get Bolton to testify - Lord knows Trump has done more than enough since December 2019 to warrant a second congressional indictment.

Martin O'Malley: 'Smarter Government'

He's back!

Martin O'Malley, former mayor of Baltimore, former governor of Maryland, and inexplicably ridiculed (unless you remember those three little words "Ready For Hillary") 2016 presidential candidate, is finally putting out his new book.  

O'Malley's book, 'Smarter Government: Governing for Results in the Information Age,' was supposed to come out in July, but it was somehow delayed.  Now, finally, it hits the book stores and the book sale Web sites on November 5 (Election Day this year, and also my birthday, by the way).  It's all about governing better and more efficiently using geographic information system (GIS) software and how to get better results for everything from reducing crime to providing better public services to even cleaning up damaged and polluted ecosystems like Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. The press release for O'Malley's book explains that it is about "a more effective way to lead that is emerging, enabled by the Information Age. It provides real solutions to real problems using GIS technology and helps develop a management strategy using data that will profoundly change an organization."

In short, it's for wonks.  It doesn't provide exciting reading or offer titillating stories, like a political memoir from Hillary Clinton.  And it doesn't have heroic narratives involving a specific identity-politicized demographic, like Hillary Clinton's new book about strong women (which she wrote with her daughter).  It's just a book on how to govern effectively, written by a boring white guy.  And it's not put out by a prestigious publisher - it was published by Esri Press, the publishing arm of Esri, the California-based company that makes . . . GIS software.  So what?  It's an important book covering an important topic in this age of dysfunctional government.

I told you all that Martin O'Malley had something worthwhile to contribute.  His support for Beto O'Rourke wasn't it.  This is.

And if the top candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination falter and the lower-tier candidates all turn out to be unsatisfactory substitutes . . . might a brokered Democratic National Convention want to consider a certain ex-governor of Maryland as a compromise candidate?

I hope O'Malley gets to talk about his book on a media tour.  Hey, if Hillary gets to do that . . ..

Comey-Out Party

Former FBI director James Comey has brought America together across partisan lines in a way that no one has been able to for fifty years.  Democrats and Republicans universally hate him.

Comey is promoting his memoir, which comes out today, in a series of interviews and public appearances, and the comments he's made so far arr bound to enrage everyone and satisfy no one.  He told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that Donald Trump might have put himself in a compromising position that could be exploited by the Russians, and said that he had tried to consult with Trump to see if there were anything that the Russians might have to incriminate him.  Comey, in all fairness, doesn't say that the Russians have any incriminating evidence of malfeasance, personal or public, against Trump - "It's possible," he says - but he does pass judgment on Trump's overall.

"A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they're pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person's not fit to be President of the United States, on moral grounds," Comey said.

As for the FBI's October 2016 re-opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton that likely sank her presidential ambitions?  Comey said that he expected her to win the presidential election, and an investigation into unseen e-mails on the laptop in the possession of her assistant Huma Abedin's estranged husband Anthony Weiner was, he felt, necessary to get out in the open as soon as possible. He thought Hillary was going to win the Presidency, and he wanted to clear her of any charges before rather than after the election so she wouldn't enter office as a compromised President, though it's hard to imagine how anyone named Clinton could enter the White House without being compromised under any circumstances. "I would so much rather Anthony Weiner had never had a laptop," Comey said.

Trump, of course, called Comey a slimeball in public.  (A far cry from Franklin Roosevelt's public line "I welcome their hatred" about his adversaries, and even a far cry from what he said about Thomas E. Dewey in private after Dewey lost the 1944 presidential election to him: "I still say he is a son of a bitch.")  But Democrats have long been ticked off at Comey also, as evidenced from a clip of Democrats questioning Comey's motives in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's e-mails from 2015 and 2016 now playing in a video released by the Republican - the Republican - National Committee.  And Comey's explanation of the Weiner laptop investigation doesn't fly with Democrats.  U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who would have given up his powerful Senate seat for the worthless presiding officer's seat overlooking the Senate floor as Vice President had the Democrats won the 2016 election, said that the FBI had also been investigating Trump but did not divulge the nature of the ongoing investigation before the election and should have done the same for Hillary.  Had Comey divulged the re-opening of the case after the election, and had Hillary won, it still would have cleared her before the inauguration and no harm would have been done.

Comey writes about his entire career in public service, not just his last year as FBI director, and he credits himself for helping to reform an FBI now under political suspicion.  Indeed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation certainly has more credibility than it did back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover or even the tenure of director Louis Freeh, whose tenure was noted for letting the real Atlanta Olympic bomber go while going after the wrong man and could only catch the Unabomber with the help of his brother (sorry, I couldn't resist the dig).  But Comey's involvement with the toxic politics of today has, if not slimed him, made him a bit unclean, as no politically involved American - Democratic, Republican, independent - wants to touch him with a ten-foot-pole.  (Which is funny, considering Comey's massive frame.) Comey will make a lot of money from this book but likely won't return to public life any time soon after.

Wolff At the Door

If any one book takes Trump out of office prematurely, it will be this one.

Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" is shaking things up, both for its controversial source material and for its stunning revelations about the Trump White House.  Some of the "revelations" are facts we already know, like Rex Tillerson saying that Trump is a moron.  But other so-called allies can't find nice things to say about Trump's intellect of lack thereof either; Reince Priebus and Steven Mnuchin both said he's an idiot, economic adviser Gary Cohn called him "dumb as sh--," and national security adviser H.R. McMaster thinks he's a dope.  Another aide couldn't get Trump to understand the Bill of Rights.  Wolff confirms that New Jersey governor Chris Christie was slated for a job in the administration but was denied on the basis of his success at putting Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's banker father in jail  when Christie was U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in the two thousand zeroes.

There's more - too much for me to repeat in this space.  Among other tidbits, Trump eats fast food to avoid being poisoned (these jokes write themselves, folks!), Melania never wanted to be First Lady, and the only reason we lucked out with Tillerson - our most avuncular Secretary of State since Dean Acheson - at the State Department when we could have gotten Trump's fellow xenophobe John Bolton is because Trump didn't think Bolton would go over well because of . . . his moustache.  (Our last mustachioed Secretary of State?  Dean Acheson.)

Steve Bannon doesn't look to good in this book . . .  to those who like the guy.  He apparently had a problem or two - or more - with all those Trump campaign meetings with the Russians at Trump Tower, calling some campaign members "treasonous" and "unpatriotic," adding that Trump had to have known about the meeting involving Paul Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr. Bannon even suggests that the President may have met with the Russians himself, and he even thought that the way Trump handled the Charlottesville incident in August 2017 might have been "25th-Amendment bad," requiring his removal of office due to a loss of sound mental capacity.

Trump didn't like that.  He's since turned on Bannon, even though many in the administration agree that it is Trump, not Bannon, who, as Trump said about Bannon, has "lost his mind."  But here's the kicker: Trump was hoping to lose and planning on losing.  The Guardian reports that, according to Wolff's book, Trump "expected to leverage his defeat for wealth, fame and a Trump-branded TV network," and "key advisers wanted jobs in television or politics."

And if that shrew Debbie Wasserman Schultz had given Martin O'Malley a fair chance at the Democratic presidential nomination instead of backing Hillary, we'd still be in the Paris Agreement now. >:-(  

How did Wolff get so much access to the Trump White House?  They gave it to him, carte blanche, and practically let him wander around interviewing everyone he could find.  Trump knew a little about Wolff's reputation and was actually expecting a favorable report.  

So what effect will Wolff's book actually have?  Sadly, despite the first sentence of this blog entry, little if any whatsoever.  First, many people found Wolff's sources to be highly suspect, and some of his stories may be exaggerated.  Second, even if these stories are completely and thoroughly true, the people who should read this book won't.  And, as  I wrote in this blog entry from December 2015, Donald Trump, like Madonna, has a knack for maintaining and even increasing his popularity with fans after saying and doing outrageous and offensive things that no one else would have gotten away with.  The idea of Trump's opponents hoping for Wolff's book to destroy his Presidency reminds me of us Madonna-haters hoping that her career was through after her movie Body of Evidence tanked.

And her cover of Don McLean's "American Pie" was the pop-music equivalent of Trump hypothetically shooting someone on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue.