That’s because Jann Wenner was only removed a couple months ago, after decades of running Rolling Stone AND the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame AND being an insufferably prejudiced shitstain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_and_Roll_Hall_of_Fame#Criticism_and_controversy
Wenner was finally outed this year in regard to his attitude towards Black and female performers when he gave an interview about his book The Masters, which features seven old white guys. No women, no people of color. When these complete exclusions of non-white, non-male performers were pointed out by a NYT interviewer in what was supposed to have been a puff piece, Wenner doubled down. He spoke openly and in such a way that all the rumors about him having said these things privately for years were instantly vindicated.
It’s worth reading (the shit about people of color and women are toward the end; look for the question starting with “History will speak. This is also a history-will-speak kind of question” and continue from there):
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/arts/jann-wenner-the-masters-interview.html
Archive link: https://archive.is/WrF3o
Yeah. Turns out this wasn’t a dinner party and he wasn’t among close friends. He wasn’t running the RRHoF for much longer after that:
TL;DR: Cher is 100%, and probably more than anyone outside the music business knows.
Just read it, holy fucking fuck.
You know, that interview isn’t as bad a proof that he’s a douche as people make it out to be.
I’m not saying he isn’t douche, he is. I’m just saying that specific interview wasn’t damning the way it’s been made out to be. What that interview points out and proves is that he’s old and arrogant and doesn’t bother to think.
It’s his actions in the rest of his life that damn him as a douche.
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. For me, it’s more that the article merely signaled the existence the vast and cumulative douchebaggery of a massively privileged, narcissistic, casually prejudiced and tone-deaf life than attempted to contain it.
It’s his actions in the rest of his life that damn him as a douche.
Oh yeah. But it was constant douche, daily, from the late 60s to this day: a word from him could make or break a career (and did) and he used it freely. People hung on his every word, his every whim, and so did he. That’s over a full half-century of constant and uninterrupted doucheness, not counting whatever normal and expected childhood douching he got up to. So much douche, in fact, that if he were a Francophone, he’d be in the running for cleanest man alive, and not just a highly-placed misogynist/racist – yet still fairly mediocre – rich and powerful English-speaking American douche.
There’s a thing Martin Luther King Jr said, that’s partially quotedHere, and I apologize for the source, but I’m a busy bee this morning and that’s the first link I could find that covered it.
Anyway, the point being is that this guy personifies exactly what MLK was saying. Outwardly an American liberal (which isn’t really the same thing that everyone everywhere uses the word liberal for, hence the specification). On the surface, he’s all for the typical ideas of equality and humanity that the word liberal is supposed to cover. But underneath, he convinces himself he’s not racist or sexist because he’s willing to vote and speak around those ideas.
But, in practice, he’s internalized the same patriarchal, bigoted fallacies as many other people do. Mind you, it is difficult to abandon the sense of superiority that thinking you’re open minded gives you long enough to actually examine yourself. And it’s his arrogance that makes it unlikely he’ll ever do the kind of self examination necessary to police himself enough to try and change.
That arrogance was reinforced by the power he held.
I mean, I don’t hate the guy. For one, hating some random stranger is a waste of energy. But he isn’t unique in his failings. Damn near every human on the planet fails at the kind of self examination necessary to see themselves as flawed. Even the best efforts can fail because it’s just so damn hard to look at yourself and divorce that view from your own inner thoughts and motivations. Being objective about the self is hard. Even when someone knows all of that, actually pulling off that objectivity is a long road filled with potholes. I know I sure as fuck fail at it often.
I just wish he be an outlier than a norm.
P.S. That NYT article was excellent, and a perfect example of the point you were making. Thank you for sharing it; I had not read it before and it was a good read.
Damn near every human on the planet fails at the kind of self examination necessary to see themselves as flawed. Even the best efforts can fail because it’s just so damn hard to look at yourself and divorce that view from your own inner thoughts and motivations. Being objective about the self is hard. Even when someone knows all of that, actually pulling off that objectivity is a long road filled with potholes. I know I sure as fuck fail at it often.
Not to make light of a very serious subject, but Jungian shadow work is a thing, and not rare. I don’t want to talk much about this publicly or with any specific detail, but as universal human truth, we only see what we want to see. That is why perfect self-objectivity will always fail, because the self is still the self, both observer and observed – and the gatekeeper to both. If a person were instead to shift their introspective goals to complete self-acceptance and self-love, those are far better at opening the inner doors to seeing oneself as one is. Objectivity is indeed hard, especially when it is intellectual and clinical and cold and self-distancing, and you already believe somewhere deep down that you have every reason to accept that the peripheries are the whole.
Jann Wenner is a perfect example of a person who has these inner demons, and a great deal of not-love toward the self, as if he has come to accept what he is as an openly gay man, for example, but still resents himself for making him fight that battle. Underneath narcissism you will always find profound wounds, and the longer someone doesn’t deal with them, or makes a habit of outsourcing their inner life (like mistreating others out of self-loathing) the more entrenched and immutable they become.
However, in terms of his statements and actions, the far more important point is that he has, and has always had, choices. It is the choices he has made in regard to other people that I really just can’t stand.
If you are interested in introspection, the kind that truly opens your inner doors to yourself, you will only ever dance around the periphery until you decide (not feel, decide) actively and as a goal, to love and accept yourself exactly as you are. No one likes to be met with anger, hatred, criticism, and contempt, but that is often what we have in ourselves for ourselves. Looking into self as the strangers we are to it and expecting clarity and openness with that level of disdain and contempt just doesn’t work.
But looking into self with the active determination to accept, understand, and love whatever you find there DOES work, and there are many of us who do that work daily. If you can do that too, your entire world will change, because the ugliness and the darkness you see – whatever it is – will be met with love and compassion, and it is that compassionate understanding which will embrace it as the solution or misapplied trait it started off as in life, and make it pliant and open to transformation.
On the other hand, your inner self well knows its own self-loathing even if your cognitive mind does not, and without accepting the fact and even the need for that self-loathing, your less known self “parts” will slam those introspective doors in your cognitive mind before you’ve ever even had a chance to open them. The human brain has an amazing facility for redirection and obfuscation: to see it clearly, to get past your own gatekeeping, you first have to accept and understand why you hate and hide what you do, and in time, love even that.
If you want to continue this via pm feel free; I’ve been at it for decades. But in the meantime, no, I don’t hate Jann Wenner, just his actions. Having met many like him I dislike the idea of his character intensely. He is absolutely a complete prick – but a prick who now, having been freed from his heavy RRHoF duties, has time to reflect on how he got to this place of opprobrium he has achieved in life, at the point of what was supposed to be the pinnacle of his success. How’d that happen, Jann?
Being real though, the fact that Rosetta godsblessed Tharpe was not in the very fucking first induction is proof the whole thing is bullshit. Sister Tharpe gave fucking birth to rock n roll. The fucking BEASTIE BOYS were in there before her. I fucking love them, but they aren’t rock n roll at all.
You can look at how many foundational rock n roll artists still aren’t listed, while non rock acts get in for hype.
It’s an empty, bullshit entity created to make money, not give real respect to artists.
Jimi Hendrix was the keystone transformation in rock and paved the pathway to metal, as well as bringing electric guitars into the mainstream and being the first known artist to incorporate distortion into his music as he did. The whammy bar was a novelty before Hendrix. And before he used a whammy bar, he’d produce distortion by holding his guitar specific ways around his speakers to use the feedback purposefully.
I swear Jimi Hendrix must have been a savant…
I agree that the rock n roll hall of fame is a sham organization, but Jimi Hendrix was the greatest influence on rock and I will die on this hill!
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Because I don’t get how arguing that one person should be in the hall of fame is an argument either for or against an argument that other foundational people should also have been in the hall of fame from the start.
Jim’s great, no argument there, but he’s much more a transformational force in a later generation of Rock 'n Roll than anything like a founding father/mother.
I was responding to the “gave birth to rock n roll” part. Maybe I mistook what you meant by that. And fair enough for Hendrix being more a transformational force. I was meaning in the sense of impacting the genre overall, and all the sub-genres he spawned.
But I wasn’t arguing that she should not be in the hall of fame/from the start. I didn’t say anything like that.
Even if you are not a fan, her legacy and impact is indisputable.
I’ll never forget her ethereal performance as Bill Murray’s alarm clock in Groundhog’s Day.
She was robbed at the Oscars that year.
Did you just “you’re god damn right” yourself?
I am indifferent to both Cher and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I’m surprised I even put in the effort to post this comment.
Thank you for your contribution.
Edit: nah
Agree. But I dont think she “change the music forever” with Believe, as she claims.
EDIT to add that talk box and vocoder were around in the 70s : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En8uiRa8jPE
Oh she did. Or rather her producers did (although I’ve read they claim to have used vocoders, not pitch correction, but who knows). Just listen to basically any modern “hip-hop” and you hear that crap.
Or maybe they just listened to the Sesame Street theme song from 1972? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMDCjA9_-tM Cause Vocoder and talk box were around way before Cher and her producers. Believe was just a big hit song, nothing innovative about it, Kraftwerk had been using that king of sound almost 30 years before she did.
I’m fully aware of vocoders and talk boxes, that both work completely differently from pitch correction. The reason why people trace the roots of exaggerated pitch correction to Cher is because her song was the first (popular) one that sounded like exaggerated pitch correction and not like a vocoder or talk box. Most audio engineers I know doubt the claims that they used vocoders, but again who knows.
I would agree that autotune might have kinda change music (although when used in a deliberately exaggerated way it doesn’t sound much different from a vocoder), but to me Cher’s song is just one of the pop hits that helped popularize the effect. IMO, it’s just a very well-produced pop song, which contributed to the rise of a form of vocal processing that’s very widespread today, which is already quite a lot. But it’s not revolutionary in itself, it’s very much in keeping with all the codes of pop music. For the records, I’m actually a teacher in audio engineering at a college and Univ so I’ve been quite interested in the over-popularity of this type of audio processing in recent decades.
The point is that it was the first pop hit to use it in that way. For what that’s worth.
I agree. My point was that it didn’t “change music forever” lol.
Exaggerated pitch correction like that sounds very different from a vocoder (at least any vocoder I’ve ever heard). I’m sure there are ways to get close to that sound using a vocoder and other tools if you really try to replicate it, but there’s a reason pretty much everyone thought they used Auto-Tune even though vocoders had been around for a long time and they claimed to have used vocoders. And as it turns out, it was Auto-Tune.
And I’d argue the reason why she thinks she changed music forever (God I hope it’s not forever) is because of how widespread that kind of use of exaggerated pitch correction has become. Not that it in itself was a completely new and different thing that was completely unlike anything anyone had ever heard ever and music is now played backwards with no notes.
I read a more recent article where they discussed saying that to keep the production trick a secret. I’ll have to find the article.
Edit: not the one I was thinking of but here’s an article
That ‘pitch machine’ would turn out to be Auto-Tune, although Taylor would try and keep this a secret in later interviews, stating that it was a Digitech Talker that he’d used to throw people off the scent!
In 1999, he told Sound on Sound: “I played around with the vocals and realised that the vocoder effect could work. I used a Digitech Talker, a reasonably new piece of kit that looks like an old guitar foot pedal, which I suspect is what it was originally designed for. You plug your mic straight into it, and it gives you a vocoder-like effect, but with clarity; it almost sounds like you’ve got the original voice coming out the other end.”
Taylor eventually revealed the truth about the process to The South Bank Show: “I was kind of playing around with the Auto-Tune, as it’s called. With this you can shift the vocal, [and] go to to the nearest note. And then what it does is if you bend a note when you’re singing, all this does is it goes along and it doesn’t bend a note up until it reaches a certain point and then it just flicks to the nearest note, so you end up with these very ‘steppy’ sounds. Every note is an exact semitone. There is no sliding and that’s where you get this crazy sound.”
Would you look at that. Just as we all suspected. I thought they didn’t want to say it was Auto-Tune because it was embarrassing.
Didn’t it give us the auto-tune effect?
No. It was already widely used, discreetly. She was the first to popularize using it cranked up to 11 as an intentional style choice. It’s more apt to say she gave us T-Pain.
And wasn’t it the producer who did the cranking uppa? She just gave the thumbs up. She didn’t even write a single note on that track.
And T-Pain is awesome, so thanks, Cher!
(His cover of War Pigs from last year was pretty sweet.)
His Tiny Desk Concert was awesome too. He actually is an incredible singer without autotune.
That one was really good! I like his humor, and his voice really is good.
I’d argue it’s exactly that exaggerated sound she’s referring to. So by her giving us T-Pain she also gave us everything post T-Pain that also sounds like that.
At least T-Pain has a sense of humor about all that.
Good for her.
Why does a pop singer care about rock and roll hall of
fame? Do they induct pop singers as well?The Rock Hall is pretty loosey-goosey with its terms. Dolly Parton was inducted last year, which she gracefully ended up accepting only after promising to release a real rock album.
Which she did last month, by the way, and it slaps. Dolly forever.
She is a treasure.
Yeah all the answers I’ve seen so far either dismiss this or discuss the word “pop”.
“Believe” was pop, and did she particularly do rock a lot? Cause I can’t recall. And I’m sure she’s awesome, but that still doesn’t automatically make her eligible for a rock and roll hall of fame.
So either she did rock (and roll), or the name of this list is basically wrong, or she doesn’t belong on there.
And don’t get me wrong, if she really doesn’t care, good for her. No need to be pissed you don’t get a price, ppl will probably recognize your impact even without a price.
I thought that too until someone pointed out they induct country and rap. But really Cher wasn’t as important as she thinks she is.
Do they induct pop singers as well?
Yes the Beatles are in.
Whitney Houston was inducted a couple of years ago. You don’t get more pop that than that, she was not rock at all; that year, she beat out Motörhead, Judas Priest, and Todd Rundgren. I don’t see how she influenced rock music, and yet, she even beat out someone who inspired her, and whose music is more closely related to rock than hers was, Chaka Khan.
I’m not saying she wasn’t incredibly talented, just that either she just doesn’t belong in the Rock n Roll HoF, or that the institution itself is a joke that shouldn’t exist.
Anyway, yeah, they induct pop singers.
The idea that random people pick a select few musicians to be inducted is just more artificial scarcity bullshit. It’s not a legitimate institution if it can’t recognize more people to give a wider breadth of exposure to the legacy of rock n roll. By inducted some, they pretend they have the authority to determine the legacy of rock n roll, but their snubs say more about their deficiencies than about those they snub.
What a weird mix of examples in the summary that doesn’t do justice to her career. Was it written by the hall of fame?
Okay, maybe she did say it… but WHEN she said it, it sounded like an AI autotuned toilet echo.
They should put her in the Hall just because of this action. Maybe put a sticker saying “we rocked you”. That’d be such a rock-ish thing to do.
Tbf, there aren’t a lot of women on that list. I saw Jay Z and no Beyonce? Tina Turner is alongside Ike? Idk, from that list, she probably shouldn’t take it personally, they don’t seem to dig chicks doing music. https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/a-z
I dunno, I think it’s pretty reasonable for “chicks” to take that personally.
Real question, they suck and are obviously sexist, why would any woman want to be part of that crowd? Being recognized as a great by them is like being recognized by nazis. Rock and Roll is based on black blues, he didn’t think that black people were thoughtful enough to include in the “masters” list, he actually said that. When someone asked why no POC or women in the masters book, he mentioned that he supposed he could have included a couple of black men or something and named a couple. That list is BS and doesn’t matter.
I’m glad Cher is calling it out, because I learned that the hall of fame is a sham and incredibly bad, but I really think she shouldn’t take it personal. Honestly, that one should be replaced, someone in the music industry should make a new one that reflects the actual industry.
The fact that willie nelson is in there is some grade a bullshit.
I respectfully disagree that she has contributed anything of value whatsoever to the music industry. She did not invent auto-tune. Music producers used auto-tune on her voice because she could not carry a tune herself. And it’s not even a good song. The music industry is rigged and God only knows why that one song is played over loudspeakers over and over again, assaulting the ears of the unconsenting masses. And although some other journalist claims to have written that article, I wouldn’t doubt that Cher wrote that article herself and paid someone to pretend he wrote it as if anyone else cares what dubious contributions she has made to the music industry.
Cher has been around decades before auto-tune even existed.
What!? You mean she was a singer prior to 1998!?
Nothing existed before The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
Him hitting the table caused the Big Bang!
Technically, if you count her big break as the alarm clock song from Groundhog Day.
Cher wasn’t the first to use Auto-tune; she was the first to use it to intentionally distort vocals as an artistic choice rather than for minor pitch corrections.
My friend auto tune did not exist in 1965 yet she still topped the 100 billard chart. She can more then carry a tune. Don’t diminish skill because you don’t like her style.
Maybe read the article first.
I did. Did I miss something specifically? This posturing is not helpful to your point. No wants to believe a jackass even if they are right.
Hey - me again.
I didn’t mean to be a jackass, I was just skimming through and yours was the second comment I saw along the same line of thought within minutes, which is why I gave a curt response. I realize now that the comments were so close together that you probably didn’t even see the first one.
All that to say - sorry for being a dick, I just wanted to highlight that OC was arguing the autotune thing, not the whole article (or the headline).
The ubiquitous robotic Auto-Tune effect? Cher did that first
“I changed music forever with ‘Believe.'”
That was one point the article brought up, not exactly her sole claim to (rock) fame.
It’s a pretty big claim she’s making. I think that’s why OC is refuting it.
“Refute” implies that they successfully argued their case, which they haven’t.
No it doesn’t.
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