Fits

 "All the news that fits." This is the nominal motto of Rolling Stone magazine. You remember magazines? Newsstands? Subscriptions that showed up in your snail mailbox? 

Okay, but maybe you remember Rolling Stone, the rock and roll newspaper started by hippies way back when there was going to be a revolution that wasn't going to be televised. Once upon a time it looked and felt like a newspaper, though it smelled faintly of patchouli.  Now it's a glossy ersatz fashion rag, stuffed to the gills with cologne samples and pictures of the current fabulous and the departing less than fabulous. Somewhere Doctor Hunter S. Thompson is looking up from his stupor and wondering how the mighty have fallen. 

Specifically, how is it that co-founder Jann Wenner could be bounced from his position on the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. Which he also helped found? The answer is simple enough. 

In an interview recently with the New York Times, Mister Wenner said of women in rock: “Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell “was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.” His comment on artists of color? “Of Black artists — 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.”

This came in response to questions about his book The Masters, all of whom were white males. The voice of a generation was speaking for his, it would seem. The generation of seventy-seven year old millionaires who had the opportunity to hang out with his pals Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono. And chat them up. 

Given a chance to rephrase by the New York Times, whose motto is "all the news that's fit to print," he doubled down. It was only after the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came calling that he chose to apologize: “In my interview with The New York Times I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks."

Currently less than eight percent of those artists inducted into the Hall of Fame are women. Less than nineteen percent of the nominees in 2019 were people of color. 

Is this news? Does it fit?

I believe it does.