Rock Gods and Edgelords

The Janus of Jann and Elon

I was going to write this week’s Freakshow about the new Elon Musk biography. I paid $16.99 for a Kindle download and started speed-reading the 600 plus pages in the bathtub yesterday. It’s a vivid read. Isaacson sets up Elon as haunted by toxic masculine abuses from a crazy dad and vicious schoolyard bullies who habitually sucker-punched him in the nose and once beat him to such a pulp that he was hospitalized. He endured the crazy white apartheid African childhood of monkeys and lions, nutty amateur aviators, negligent parenting, smuggled emeralds, racism and guns, better described in Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.

But just as I was getting to Elon’s solo, brave pilgrimage from Africa to Canada, a New York Times alert pinged urgent news that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Board had booted its founder Jann Wenner over an interview in which he described female and black musicians as too “inarticulate” to be labeled “masters” of the art of rock.

Then and there, soaking in the bath, I saw the Janus face that leers over our era. Walter Isaacson’s Millenial Edgelord, richest man in the world, and Jann Wenner’s white male rock gods, two sides of the coin. Thirty years separate the living men, exactly one generation apart. A long while since Mick Jagger was wrinkle-free. The weed is better and legal, we have electric cars, Uber, AI girlfriends for incels. Major corporations have diversity-washed themselves into multi-culti rainbows. But one thing remains the same.

Walter Isaacson is our preeminent biographer, and in his own way a myth maker like Wenner. He is both journalist, “writing the first draft of history” and a fan of his subjects. Scott Galloway recently scorched Isaacson on the Pivot podcast as “an apologist for these assholes” practicing “access journalism.” Isaacson did write a book about geneticist Jennifer Doudna, but his hits are about white men. More greatness there. Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Einstein. Musk.

Wenner too, mythologized the white male rock gods of the 60s and 70s. Some — Mick! - clearly held homoerotic appeal for a man who eventually ditched his wife for a younger man, designer Matt Nye. Wenner never had much use for women, although he employed Annie Leibovitz and occasionally covered a few cool-girls - who, we now know, Wenner thought couldn’t express the philosophy of rock.

I wrote a few features for Rolling Stone in the years just before the Charlottesville rape story debacle, and met Wenner once or twice. Most legacy magazines in New York that aren’t specially for women are run by dude-itors, and Rolling Stone was no exception, but the ones I worked with were fair and good at their jobs.

I once did meet a Wenner protege who more precisely represented the Wennerist attitude toward women. A gray-beard pushing 50, he wanted to assign me a story for a celebrity magazine on aging actresses. I was freelancing and needed the money. We met in his office. Behind him on a shelf was a picture of a much younger woman and a toddler. He had a very specific idea of what he wanted on the article. “Get them to talk about what it feels like at that moment when they realize that no man will ever want to kiss them again,” he said. The lip-smacking relish with which he envisioned this reportage freaked me out. I left and never followed up.

Wenner is 77. He has apologized of course, but in some way, he has rolled the rock over the rock and roll tomb. His kind of sexism was the air Boomer women breathed, the water the chicks and groupies swam in, singing along to the Rolling Stones rock anthems.

Under my thumb
It's a squirmin' dog who's just had her day
Under my thumb
A girl who has just changed her ways …

You taste good, like a black girl should …

No one does that anymore. Oh wait: Bitches and hos.

Among the sons of Boomer men are the uncool geeks like Musk who, as Isaacson writes, danced like a robot. Some now preside over unimaginable empires of wealth. They are designing the future economy, if not the future of the planet. Like the Carnegies and Rockefellers and Morgans in the last significant fortune-creating economic surge, women are not involved. Pronatalist California Edgelords have about as much use for women as Wenner does, except in terms of their role in techno-utopian harems of procreation.

Isaacson’s book revealed for the first time that Musk’s occasional girlfriend Grimes has produced (or provided DNA, surrogacy involved somewhere) for not just two but three mini-Musks. (I stopped paying attention after trying to suss out how to say the first child, X Æ A-12 and missed the second one, born by surrogate, named Exa Dark Sidereal Musk).

Promoting his book last week, Isaacson tweeted a picture of Musk with two of his ten kids, twins birthed by one of his employees, Shivan Zilis. That provoked Grimes to Tweet “tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer.” Referring to the image of Musk with Zilis and their kids, she posted, “I have never been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment, despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart.”

Of course there are no mythic living women among this crowd in Silicon Valley. I spent time out there a few years ago trying to suss out why so few techie women get seed funding. The young ones were so harassed by VCs that they resorted to wearing hoodies and slouching into meetings on Sand Hill Road. The older women who had managed to stay in the business since the early Gates and Jobs days were trying to set up separate funds for women only.

No biographer will do hagiography on any of them. The most famous of them all has been made legend in books on Theranos. There’s still the myth of Eve, we have that always with us. She’s not got much of a speaking part though, probably not articulate enough if she had.

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