I'm not joining the public execution. I think Rolling Stone as a magazine was a cultural player and so is, on a more marginal level, the RRHF (which doesn't mean you have to agree with everyone of their decisions and I don't).
BUT: (And it's a big butt!)
(https://i.imgur.com/rQI2MnH.png)
Wenner says his choices were "intuitive" and that he followed a 60ies/70ies zeitgeist. That may be so, but it doesn't change the fact that his list of interviewees is essentially a rock-interested white college boy's wet dream: Bono, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend? Wow, what a fearless cultural explorer Herr Wenner was - to boldly go where no rock journo has gone before.
Now Wenner can't change in the aftermath who he interviewed and who he didn't, but I would have expected from someone like him to be more cognizant why he deemed Pete Townshend more interview-worthy than Jimi Hendrix, Springsteen more interesting than Lucinda Williams and Bono more important than Prince.
A 60ies/early 70ies zeitgeist omitting Hendrix as if Hey Joe and Woodstock never happened? A through-and-through cerebral person (in her mind, lyrics and music) like Joni Mitchell who in the 70ies was nearly on every musician's tape deck for the beauty of her words and music "not philosophical" enough? I also marvel at his statement that the ability to hold a "deep conversation" should decide whether someone has a satisfactory cultural impact for him. Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, BB King, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters might not have been able to intellectualize about their music like some well-educated white middle class kid, but maybe their cultural impact (hopefully not denied by Herr Wenner) relied on something other than perceptive interview statements?
Wenner could have said: "The choice of these interviewees was of course the product of a white college kid's tunnel vision, I can't change who I am or who I was." But instead he makes a crap throwaway comment like "You know, 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." That is the worst part of his interview, a really patronizing, mansplaining and insulting bullshit remark. F*** you too.
No, Wenner is not a cape-wearing racist or a women-subjugating misogynist, but he's a very white (geriatric) college boy - and surprisingly devoid of any self-reflection + curiously empathyless. Truly old white man set in rock.
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRFyYHdgc4JIpspaUicpOxaZF-WCwYLV4hflQ&usqp=CAU)
PS: And if a committed crowd pleaser like Bono is all of the sudden supposed to meet "historical standard", then so is Chad Kroeger, pope visit or not.