Megan Skiendel: A Harvard-trained lawyer with zero music background becomes the man Stevie Wonder eulogizes on CNN as the defining champion of artists in the modern era. That sentence only makes sense if you've already decided what the story is.
Miles Ashworth: What did Wonder actually say?
Megan Skiendel: Color-blind approach to talent. Unconditional championing of artists. After Davis died on June 22nd — 94 years old, peacefully, Manhattan, family there. And it's not wrong exactly, it's just — it's doing a lot of smoothing.
Miles Ashworth: Over 1973.
Megan Skiendel: Over 1973. The Columbia firing. The allegations of misusing corporate funds. Davis was president of Columbia by 1967 — NYU undergrad, Harvard Law, no music training, none — and by '73 he was out. And then he rebuilt. But the tribute narrative just — actually, wait, that's the thing worth sitting with. The tribute isn't wrong about what came after. It's just very quiet about what came between.
Miles Ashworth: He's a curator, not a musician. Like a studio head who never shot a frame of film but greenlit every classic of his era. That is what we're actually mourning — and it turns out that's quite a different thing from what Wonder described.
Miles Ashworth: Now, the actual machinery of it — Monterey, 1967. Davis goes to the festival. No music background, a lawyer. And he comes back from that weekend convinced rock is the future. Immediately signs Janis Joplin. Springsteen follows. He's built an entire identity inside six years.
Megan Skiendel: Six years. And then he's out.
Miles Ashworth: And then he founds Arista in 1974 — the very next year — and, well, signs Aretha Franklin. Revitalizes her. Discovers Whitney Houston. And twenty-five years after Monterey, he's the one who orchestrates Santana's Supernatural, which — eight Grammys. Record-tying.
Megan Skiendel: Eight. And then J Records, Alicia Keys. That's — honestly, that's three separate label-defining moments across three decades.
Miles Ashworth: Three. But here's what nobody leads with — he was also seeding sub-labels. Babyface. L.A. Reid. Puff Daddy. His investment, his ownership structure, his umbrella. That's not mentorship, that's vertical integration.
Megan Skiendel: That's a lot of infrastructure for one person to control. Like — RCA Music Group, BMG North America — wait, he chaired both?
Miles Ashworth: Chair and CEO. Frankly, at some point you stop calling it an ear for talent and start calling it a monopoly with good playlists.
Megan Skiendel: And then he turns around and donates a million dollars to the Grammy Museum. First million-dollar donor. They name the theater after him. Which is — I mean, that's not leaving your legacy to chance, is it.
Miles Ashworth: That's not legacy-building. That's legacy-purchasing. There's a distinction and it matters.
Megan Skiendel: Right, but — wait, actually, the Kelly Clarkson thing sits really awkwardly next to all of this. She goes public in 2007, fighting him over My December, her own album, her own songs, and he's actively trying to suppress the release. That's the version of Davis that doesn't make it into the Stevie Wonder tribute.
Miles Ashworth: No, it doesn't. And Clarkson wasn't some untested act he could dismiss — she'd already won American Idol, she had commercial proof. The control reflex was still there.
Megan Skiendel: Which is the tension. Wonder calls it unconditional championing. Clarkson would call it something else entirely. And the Grammy Museum — inducted non-performer, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2000 — the institution just keeps confirming the version he funded.
Miles Ashworth: And none of it survives streaming. The specific power he had — radio access, retail shelf space, four labels total controlling all of it — gone. What Wonder's tribute is actually canonizing is a structure that no longer exists. Whether that's a loss or an exposure, frankly, depends on which side of the velvet rope you were on.
Miles Ashworth: And that's the image that stays with me. Stevie Wonder. CNN. One of the last people alive who was actually *there* — who lived the same era, made music in that same bottleneck economy — and he's the one placing the period on the sentence. There's nobody left to correct the draft.
Megan Skiendel: The 1973 chapter's still in the record, though. Columbia firing, the financial mismanagement allegations — it didn't disappear. It's just not what CNN called Stevie Wonder to talk about.
Miles Ashworth: No. And I suppose that's — well, that's fair, actually. The archive holds it. Whitney Houston holds it. Arista holds it. The Grammy Museum theater with his name on the wall holds it, in its way. The tribute just chose its frame. They always do.
