Encounters with Great Recordings of the 20th Century, #5: A Tribe Called Quest, "Midnight Marauders"

Now that Rolling Stone magazine is in the news again, and again for a not-great reason, it seems an opportune time for me to own up to something in a more cohesive way than I've done in the past, which has been in dribs and drabs on social media. As most of you are aware, this week sees the publication of a literally jaw-dropping interview with RS founder or co-founder and longtime publisher and editor Jann Wenner. Ace interlocuter David Marchese did the honors for The New York Times Magazine, and it's clear in one of the exchanges, in which Wenner opines that Black and female musical artists of his era were simply not articulate enough for him to bother interviewing back in the day, that Wenner is blithely stepping straight into a trap that Marchese hadn't even set for him. 

Wenner's glib, smug, not-even-confession sits alongside other gobsmacking glib, smug shrugging-offs of various journalistic malpractices. This doesn't speak well of Rolling Stone's ostensible legacy, and here one is semi-obliged to mumble about how that's a shame becuase Rolling Stone did publish a lot of great writing and that is certainly true. But it's because of Wenner that the existence of RS will always have been at the very least a mixed blessing and if he wants to drag the rag's rep through the mud by freely admitting that he actually let his interview subjects edit their Q&As before they went to press, that's entirely on him.

I did a bit of writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1990s. When I visited the office, I always slumped, and tried to steer clear of the boss man, because I figured that having made his allowance for the great David Fricke, he didn't want to see any other unusually tall people in the office. (And indeed, aside from David, there weren't any on staff as far as I could tell.) A couple of great things about RS when Wenner ran the place: it paid well, and it paid on time. Always. For a freelancer, that's huge. 

I was a journeyman front-of-the-book writer who never broke into features despite the encouragement of editors like Barbara O'Dair and Bob Love. I did obits on the likes of Albert Goldman, Michael Clarke, and Harry Nilsson (who should have been memorialized by Dawn Eden, who did the last interview with the man and who I tapped as a source for the piece). I contributed capsules to packages like "The Hundred Greatest Rock Videos of All Time." I interviewed Yoko Ono for her Off-Broadway musical, New York Rock, a misbegotten project in which one might nevertheless see the seeds of Rent. And, for editor Anthony De Curtis, I did one record review. And here my tale of woe begins.

I haven't yet read Joe Hagan's Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, but I've dipped into it more than once for research purposes and it appears to be lively, dishy, entertaining, well-researched, comprehensive, and right-minded. Hip-hop is mentioned precisely once in the book, and early on, in the prologue. Like so: "Success would blunt Wenner's feel for the culture and sow the seeds of his decline. He missed the rise of MTV and hip-hop, and later the Internet, cultural revolutions he experienced like a well-heeled uncle squinting toward Manhattan from a ski-slope in Sun Valley, where he began wintering in the 1990s." Oh that reminds me, another piece I did for Rolling Stone was based arounf the premise of Rock Stars Give You Advice on How To Buy A Computer, with Henry Rollins averring, "Even if you think the computer you're buying has plenty of memory, you're going to need MORE" and stuff like that.  One can infer, from the new Wenner interviw and also from a lot of other things, that Wenner had not just a blind spot as far as hip-hop went but was probably openly hostile to it. Nevertheless, the music editors at the magazine made good-faith efforts to cover it even when they themselves weren't entirely enthusiastic about it. Remember, these were the days before Tom Petty enlisted Rick Rubin as a producer, the days when Petty would vehemently drawl, when asked about sampling, "It's stealing." 

Long story short, record reviews editor De Curtis, a good critic (albeit one of old-school taste) and a kind, pleasant guy, assigned me to review Midnight Marauders, the third studio album by A Tribe Called Quest. I don't recollect the conversation, I can't remember if he offered me a choice of records to write up. I do remember having been enthusiastic about Peoples' Instinctive Travels and the thing that was getting called "Alternative Hip-Hop" in general (especially De La Soul's Three Feet High And Rising). I felt these records were encouraging in a larger cultural sense in a time when I, a Delicate White Person In His Early Thirties, was increasingly discomfited by what he saw as aberrant elements emerging in hip-hop, as in the anti-semitism expressed by Professor Griff of Public Enemy or the unapologetic misogyny of some of the raps on Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted. Put another way, I took the whole "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" business far too much to heart. 

My really dumb two-star review of Midnight Marauders now sits behind a paywall, and I'm not going to pony up to read it in its entirety again. Nor am I going to go fetch my DVD-ROMs or whatever they are of "The Complete ," which probably don't even work on my current computer anymore anyway. All I need is to read the lede of the review to cringe: "'Can you envision/A brother who ain't dissin'?' asked A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip on the rap group's  1990 debut album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, a breakthrough in what became known as Afrocentric hip-hop. It was a refreshing idea then, and Quest pulled it off with panache; their raps were gently wry, while their jazzy jams proved that dope beats don't need sledgehammer impact to kick ass." You see where this is going: straight to hippieville, really. Which is putting it kindly. De Curtis might as well have asked David Van Driessen, the wet-noodle teacher on Beavis and Butthead, to write up the record. In my eagerness to tsk-tsk the group for what I took as untoward aggression, I failed to hear what the beats and rhymes were actually doing, which I won't try to describe here (I've done enough damage!) but will say I have come to understand as being legitimately great. Instead of appreciating that at the time, I instead wrote the thing that I have come to hate, as both a critic and a reader. That is, A Concern Troll Review.

As I mentioned, the review is behind a paywall now, but during the early days of Rolling Stone Digitizing Its Content, it was not behind a paywall, and about eight or nine years ago, every coupld of months or so a bunch of folks would find it on the RS site, just sitting there, and would find me on Twitter to tell me what an imbecile I was. It was a lot of work, composing individual apology tweets saying I Was Wrong and that Indeed Midnight Marauders Is A Great And Landmark Hip-Hop Album. From hereon in, this post will serve as my all-purpose mea culpa. In the words of maestro Lou Reed, "Shows just how wrong you can be."  

Comments

[MW]

I love ATCQ, and "Midnight Marauders" is indeed a great album. (The first three and the last are, and I'll even vouch for the fourth even though it's a lesser album.)

To be fair, those concerns you raised back then are something I do think about now in relation to some of the hip-hop I listen to from the '90s, at least as it applies to the albums I do enjoy. Ice Cube's "Death Certificate" is one that immediately comes to mind. It has a lot of his best tracks, but it's always been a struggle trying to get around what I don't like about "Black Korea" and "No Vaseline" (the latter which is usually celebrated as one of the great diss tracks, and for much of the time, it does seem that way).

[George]

Joe Hagan's book alleges that Wenner sexually harassed men an women on the Rolling Stone staff.

With Wenner gone from the Hall of Fame board, maybe the Monkees can be inducted. I've read that Wenner used his clout to keep them out for decades.

A lot of Rolling Stone's problems came from its core readership. In the magazine's early decades, issues with women or POC on the cover sold poorly, compared to issues with white men on the cover. That steered who the magazine covered and idolized. The readers were also resistant to new kinds of music -- the 1977 Sex Pistols cover was the worst-selling issue up to that point.

[George]

Wenner epitomizes a certain kind of Boomer, forever fixated on the "classic rock" stars of their youth -- white guys playing guitars, who began their careers in the '6s or '70s. A lot of them (Jagger, Dylan, Springsteen, etc) are Wenner's friends, guys he often socializes with.

That's the RS "canon." Alas.

[Titch]

A Tribe Called Quest's "The Low End Theory" appeared in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Rock Albums in 2003 at #154, but, of course, it was never reviewed when it was released in 1991. Wenner's interview last week was headline news on the BBC, so yes - jaw-dropping, even over the pond. But for a teenager in Europe reading rock magazines in the 80s-90s, Rolling Stone's and their critics' grasp of contempory music was completely out of touch, compared to, say, the British music press. The only thing Rolling Stone had going for it, were articles by P.J. O'Rourke and Peter Travers' film reviews. And they did get exclusive interviews with my pop idols of the time. The magazine has been unreadable and uninteresting for years. They try to compensate for their decades of ignoring anything that wasn't white men playing guitars, by remaking their "Greatest Albums Of All Time", in 2020 to suddenly look gangsta. But nobody is reading Rolling Stone anymore. And after 40 years of subscribing, I will finally be letting my subscription lapse. Smart move of Wenner to sell it to the Chinese, when he could.

[George]

I've read that when Wenner's younger staffers played punk records for him in the late '70s, the publisher said: "That's not music -- that's just noise!"

Just like his parents probably reacted to the first Elvis records.

[MW]

This isn't much of a defense, but Wenner is hardly the first person guilty of having a fixation for the stars of their youth, especially among the cabal running the Hall of Fame. The recent trends for nomination and induction suggest a fixation on the '80s pop stars of their youth - Duran Duran? Pat Benatar? Lionel Richie? Stevie Nicks's solo career? They don't amount to much beyond nostalgia. When I think of music that really is timeless and of great value, I usually think of it as something that can inspire someone generations later to make great and innovative work of their own - it could be how the records were made, how the songs were written, how the songs were performed, but it's something worthwhile that's picked up by someone who discovers that music many years later, and it's got to be more substantial than, say, Benatar's well-meaning intentions. I can hear that in A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Eric B. & Rakim, OutKast, Beck, the White Stripes, the New York Dolls, Joy Division/New Order, Sonic Youth, the B-52s, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, etc...they all sold less records, but they inspired far better music.

[MW]

(I didn't list enough women, but Sleater-Kinney, X-Ray Spex, The Shangri-Las, Lucinda Williams, the Marvelettes, the Breeders and the Pixies for that matter among many, many others are up there too.)

[George]

I didn't intend it as a defense, MW. Just showing how Wenner had become as out of touch as his parents' generation. And Wenner was only 30 when he lost interest in new music, and burrowed into '60s nostalgia.

[MW]

I should have clarified George - I meant ME saying "Wenner is hardly the first person guilty of having a fixation for the stars of their youth" is hardly a defense for Wenner.

[MW]

(That is, he's not the only one, but it's still bad, especially when he was running the biggest music publication in the country.)