The chatter greeting tabloid news of John Mayer’s week-long
relationship with Jessica Simpson earlier this month was one of
overwhelming cultural befuddlement. A Google search of “John Mayer”
+ “Jessica Simpson” + “odd couple” calls up no fewer than 670
results. “What could the soulful, perpetual college boy possibly
see in the once-reigning Daft Queen of Reality Television?” America
seemed to be asking itself.
The same question was apparently on Mayer’s mind as well, since
no sooner had the nation’s collective consciousness begun to
grapple with this pop culture oddity than Mayer posted the sleeve
of Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” on his blog, co-opting a
militant anthem to whine symbolically about Simpson’s public pining
— probably not exactly what Chuck D had in mind. Simultaneously, Mayer’s friends
took to the press deriding Simpson as a “desperate” now-ex-paramour
using Mayer like some G-rated media succubus to “stay in the
spotlight.” What sparked Mayer’s initial interest in Simpson
remains a mystery. Surely it was not anything so trite as publicity
or physicality. Perhaps it was her theoretical conceptualizations regarding the
evolutionary biology of Chicken of the Sea’s long march through
history into tuna fish?
Conventional wisdom concerning Mayer’s innate superiority to
Simpson in the Smarts Department, however, might be a bit off base.
While I can’t say I’ve listened to Simpson’s unfortunately titled
A Public Affair, I did toil my way through Mayer’s latest,
Continuum, a painfully transparent attempt to stretch
beyond the lovelorn ballads that propelled him into international
stardom into critiques of U.S foreign policy, media consolidation
and youth disenfranchisement. Despite being utterly bland,
predictable and completely devoid of anything approaching
substance, the new set has earned Mayer much praise as a maturing
artist.
“Mayer made his name with love songs like ‘Your Body Is a
Wonderland,’ but on Continuum his concerns are more
global,” music critic Jody Rosen opined in Entertainment
Weekly. “‘Waiting on the World to Change,’ with a melody
lifted straight out of Curtis Mayfield’s classic civil rights
rallying cry, ‘People Get Ready,’ carries an incisive protest
message, defending his generation against the charge of political
apathy, and railing against the Bush administration and the
corporate media.”
Never underestimate the power of carefully tousled hair and a
carefully cultivated aura of thoughtfulness, I suppose. Still, for
some reason I felt obliged to dig into this “incisive” defense of
the Mayer Generation ┢. Here is what I found in the
opening verse:
Me and all my friends, we’re all misunderstood;
They say we stand for nothing and there’s no way we ever could;
Now we see everything that’s going wrong; with the world and those
who lead it
The die is cast. The sneering duplicitous “they” have made a
terrible error in writing off Mayer and his friends. This is where
one might expect Mayer to assert the reasons why “they” are
terribly wrong and detail what punishment will be exacted for this
unforgivable miscalculation and shortsightedness. Instead we
get:
We just feel like we don’t have the means to rise
above and beat it;
So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to
change
.
Mayer frets we — I’m using the royal “we” here to signify The Man,
his minions and all those in his service — believe he stands for
nothing. Why this matters in light of the fact that Mayer makes
quite clear, whatever he stands for, he plans to do absolutely
nothing about it, but he does offer as a feeble excuse that
It’s hard to beat the system when we’re standing at a
distance and
It’s not that we don’t care, we just know
that the fight ain’t fair; so we keep waiting, waiting on the world
to change. Brave words in difficult times, and, oh, when does
the new season of
According to Jim start anyway?
Ironically enough, this much-heralded defense of the unmotivated
— one cannot scan FM radio without landing on it at least four
times an hour — cannot match the passion Mayer brings to sassing
an unnamed lover whom he bluntly prophesies will be a “bitch
because you can” in order to “leave me feeling dirty.” What was
that bit from Mayer’s last record? “Fathers be good to your
daughters/Daughters will love like you do/Girls become lovers who
turn into mothers/So mothers be good to your daughters, too.”
Right, right…unless, of course, they’re bitches! Mayer’s problem
with women and corporate media, however, is nothing compared to his
ire for Sir Isaac Newton, as evidenced by his repeated warnings in
another song’s chorus, “Gravity, Stay the hell away from me!”
When Mayer gets back to politics, it’s to warn, We’re never
going to win the world; We’re never going to stop this war; We’re
never going to beat this; If belief is what we’re fighting
for.
Let’s tally up then, shall we? No action, no beliefs — save for
his conviction in the depravity of certain bitches and the undying
badness of gravitational pull — and a handwritten note in the
Continuum’s liner notes in which Mayer confides, “I can’t
complain but I know I should.” You know, he’s globally
concerned.
Still, Mayer somehow finds it in himself to conclude “Waiting on
the World to Change” with the pronouncement, One day our
generation is gonna rule the population; so we keep on waiting,
waiting on the world to change
Forgive us our doubts, John. Come back in two weeks, give us a
progress report on your war with gravity and uppity women, and then
we’ll discuss the rest of your agenda. Er, I mean, the
Continuum.
