You Know You’ve Lost the Plot When Even Ted Nugent Thinks You’re a Racist
In what’s turned out to be a week full of L’s, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Board of Directors member and Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner might have suffered his biggest one yet. First he got removed from said board of directors for suggesting female and black musicians weren’t as impactful as their white, male counterparts during a New York Times interview, then artists like Living Colour started blasting him online.
And now, the gun-toting, transphobic jack weasel known as Ted Nugent has called Wenner out as a racist and sexist. His comments came during a recent YouTube video he posted, where he chimed in on the situation.
“Jann Wenner righteously and wonderfully created Rolling Stone magazine to celebrate the artists that have never been given credit except by me and us here at ‘Nightly Nuge’ on My Real America’s Voice that the music that touches our soul came from black heroes who had more soul because they had to get out of the curse of slavery and celebrate freedom musically.
“[Wenner was removed] because of racist and and misogynistic attacks that said that black and female artists are not articulate enough to reference in his book about rock and roll history, which is so clearly biased and so clearly racist and so clearly misogynistic. And those are the things that he has always accused me of…”
Fucking oof…
Just for clarification’s sake, Nugent doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to racial equality, so you know it’s bad when even he thinks you stepped over the line.
For those that don’t know — though I’d be surprised if you didn’t by now — this all kicked off when Wenner was interviewed in the New York Times to promote his book titled The Masters: Conversations with Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, Bono, and Springsteen.
When asked why the book didn’t feature any women, he said:
“Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level. Joni [Mitchell] was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ 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… 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.”
Following the nearly immediate backlash, Wenner issued the following statement as an apology:
“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. The Masters is a collection of interviews I’ve done over the years that seemed to me to best represent an idea of rock ‘n’ roll’s impact on my world; they were not meant to represent the whole of music and its diverse and important originators but to reflect the high points of my career and interviews I felt illustrated the breadth and experience in that career. They don’t reflect my appreciation and admiration for myriad totemic, world-changing artists whose music and ideas I revere and will celebrate and promote as long as I live. I totally understand the inflammatory nature of badly chosen words and deeply apologize and accept the consequences.”
Just as our friends over at Metal Injection said, we can’t believe we’re actually on the same side of a race and sex issue as Uncle Ted. My, how the turn tables…
