"Uh...Yeah....This song should start out...
Remember like the Bobby Brown records? You'd hear the touch tone dialin'.
It'd be like Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep...briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng...
(in girl voice) Hello?
Yo baby, What's up girl?...
yo girl I was thinking maybe I'd come over and we'd take our relationship to the next level...and in the mornin', girl, I'm gonna pour you a bowl of Count Chocula... and I'm gonna pull some of the oat peices out, so it tastes like there's just more marshmallow....'cause thats how much I care about you girl....Girl, I would change up the marshmallow to oat ratio for you.
John Mayer: Ron Paul Reads the Constitution
Well, there's this.
The Dean himself, Robert Christgau (whom, I might add, I have never met, although I admire his work, and it is to him that I owe that Da Capo "other notable" nod-- thanks, Dean!), has submitted the following abstract for the EMP Pop Conference:
"Waiting on the World to Change"
John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change" isn't my favorite political song of the neofascist epoch. That would still be James McMurtry's "We Can't Make It Here," which predates the last presidential election. Though I like Randy Newman's "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" and love Rilo Kiley's "It's a Hit," that our most eloquent antifascist song is now more than three years old illustrates why "Waiting on the World to Change" still tops them in my book. Neither indictment nor celebration, though closer to the former even if few of its fans or detractors know it, it's the truth. Although passive non-involvement is no less the rule in indie rock than in any other sector of youth culture, the song isn't much admired by self-appointed admirers professional or amateur. There are many reasons for this, most of them bad--that it was a hit, that Mayer once sang "Your Body Is a Wonderland" (that one really gets them going), that he dated Jessica Simpson, and so forth. Desultory online research indicates that these feelings are often rationalized in other terms. But common sense, not to mention the absurd arguments actually adduced, tells me I've got it right.
So what I propose here is an investigation of rock's and especially indie-rock's response to neofascism that respects and centers on this hit song. I have no idea where my research will take me, and I do not rule out the possibility that I will unearth all kinds of rousing protests and practical action campaigns I know nothing about. That would be great, frankly--I want nothing more than for my people to rise up. But should it not transpire, it would be my pleasure to praise John Mayer at EMP. It's been my instinct to like and respect him since long before I saw him guest at a Buddy Guy concert two years ago (they make fun of that too). I would hope not just to research Mayer but--if possible, which it might be—to interview him, perhaps eliciting political opinions, hedges, stupidities, who knows
I should add that it's not inconceivable that my investigation will take me in another direction. My initial impulse was to undertake an ideological analysis of online rock criticism, from Pitchfork outwards, and I will certainly be looking into the apparent prejudices of those who have strong opinions about Mayer (who Pitchfork rarely mentions, near as I can tell). Some sort of breakdown involving what I conclude will certainly be a part of what I do even if only an incidental one. But I might get sufficiently fascinated to do more with it than that, so that Mayer turns into more a starting point than a beginning-to-end subject.
John Mayer began as a slightly dorky singer/songwriter with a remarkably percussive acoustic-guitar style and a way with both soaring melodies (before Chris Martin standardized those little falsetto flights in choruses) and the kind of lyrics that both grown-ups and earnest college kids could appreciate. He first made his name the same way many artists do now-- only back then they used MP3.com, not MySpace.com. I'm pretty sure I read about him on a Guster forum. I liked the acoustic version of "My Stupid Mouth" on his website, the clever false ending. From the same self-released album, Inside Wants Out, I also liked the acoustic "No Such Thing", with that catchy, high-rising hook and its crystal-clear, incredibly word-smart verses about the kind of bourgeois existential angst that lots of people much douchier than me (I swear!) and some wonderful, wonderful friends would also have in common. At first the fans all seemed to be overly self-conscious, awkward, easily obsessed types, like me. I wanted to see him when he played Schubas the first time, opening for Cary Pierce in November 2000, but I wasn't 21. I had to wait until a matinee opening for Glen Phillips at the same venue in February 2001. The House of Blues show 13 months later is the first time I remember people being mean-- some girl pushed.
Yes, he wanted to be Dave Matthews a little bit, but he also wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, and possibly even Radiohead. He sang songs like "Comfortable", which hits upon the idea of a love that feels "broken in". The ex-girlfriend could at least tell Miles Davis from John Coltrane-- not that that's much of an accomplishment, but this new girl couldn't, you know? "3x5" sounded awkwardly similar to Matthews' "Two Step", but it had some of Mayer's least specifically age-bound lyrics yet. And yes, of course I liked "Love Song for No One", yet another song that some guy named Jack Joseph Puig (and another dude named John Alagia) got paid a lot of money to make sound crappier when it came time for a studio album. "Neon" was incredibly difficult and fun to play, and he made it different every performance, whether with scatting and guitar solos or eventually, for a time, with electronic effects in keeping with the fact that he covered "Kid A" (nicely!). He wrote "Why Georgia", a song that introduced the phrase "quarter-life crisis" before it was popular, "St. Patrick's Day", which makes a holiday of mindless excess into a carol-ish (and in retrospect "Daughters"- and "Wheel"-predicting) tune about the seasonal cycle for relationships, and "City Love", with its jazzy, somewhat dissonant guitar chords and phrases like "falling asleep to the sound of sirens". There was "Covered in Rain", ostensibly an outro to "City Love" that developed into a song of its own, with its details about CVS and "staying in and watching CNN" making those dead months after 9/11 come alive without so much as mentioning what happened. Fuck Bruce Springsteen, OK? This was my coping music. And there was "Something's Missing", with its friends/money/sex (but something's missing, see?) checklist and "I wish there was an over the counter test for loneliness" and "How come every thing I think I need always comes with batteries" and "When autumn comes, it doesn't ask/ It just walks in, where it left you last./ And you never know, when it starts/ Until there's fog inside the glass around your summer heart." His sound and lyrics were beginning to go really interesting places with "Clarity", the first song from second major-label album Heavier Things, which had a guitar riff like the Broken Social Scene's "Looks Just Like the Sun", a gorgeous melody and beat, and poignantly pretty lyrics about "rock candy" melting so that "only diamonds now remain" (and drumming by ?uestlove!). Still in his early 20s, and only beginning to see the fame that would come, he sang, "I will wait to find if this will last forever/ And I will pay no mind when it won't and it won't 'cause it can't." I believe I compared it to Ernest Becker (mind/body dichotomy) and Van Morrison's jump from troubadour to band leader between Astral Weeks and Moondance. I was young, all right?
Room for Squares, Mayer's major-label debut, was an album full of great songs, but the production was pretty crappy. The hired studio hacks all helped to make an album that would sound fine on American radio in 2001, which I think many of us can probably agree was not a golden age for Clear Channel-ready roots-rock. "Your Body Is a Wonderland", a song which Mayer consistently made interesting live, became this bubbling, plastic thing, something unfamiliar, and yet a secret weapon: You see, back then, if you liked a guy like John Mayer, you actually WANTED him to get famous. And "YBIAW" was obviously going to do that. You could tell that Mayer thought his prodigious guitar chops and writerly (though always unpretentious!) lyrics were going to get him the respect he deserved even as he (presumably) made some concessions to get on the radio. He didn't know (or didn't care) that, as Carl Wilson writes, "The virtuosity that cool audiences today applaud, the sort Celine always fumbles, is not about having a multi-octave voice or flamenco-fast fingers: It's about being able to manipulate signs and symbols, to hitch them up and decouple them in a blink of an eye, to quote Homer but in the voice of Homer Simpson." So first, on Heavier Things, he put more of an emphasis on being a wise songwriter, shifting from his detailed vignettes of young-adult life to more generic songs striking a worldly pose-- giving fathers advice ("Daughters", an instant wedding jam-- not at mine, though-- that is also pretty damn presumptuous) or comparing romance to a circle ("The Wheel"). On a song called "The New Deep" he basically promises to be as trite as he wants to be... no more analyzing, just getting through life, making a buck, whatever. Starting to suck, to someone who DIDN'T think he sucked before. His "Blues Trio" album, Try, meanwhile, allowed him to show all of us that he has flamenco-fast, Clapton-slow fingers, fumbling the same virtuosity test that Celine does.
A dear friend of mine, groomsman at my wedding, who kept the faith all along and kept listening to Mayer (and Stevie Wonder, and the Meters, and Charlie Hunter, and Philip Glass) for these past several years says he never listens to the albums. The albums are no good. The live shows are where it's at. His theory is that Mayer can use his guitar as a percussion instrument so well that he just got lazy and never really learned how to get drums to function properly on a record, so the drumming on the albums is always bland. This lack of interesting drum sounds might help explain one valid reason why Pitchfork-type listeners, perhaps more attuned to texture and rhythm as well as melody and lyrics, may have written Mayer off. I tried listening to my vinyl copy of Room for Squares again the other day, and it didn't sound very good. One of those records that sounds better on mp3. (Or, jeez, as a live bootleg.) Thanks, digital technology.
What soured me on Mayer almost completely for now, although I still love much of the old stuff, was that, even at a time when the door in critical circles had swung completely wide, suddenly he was putting out music even I couldn't get behind. I remember being surprised when I saw Christgau's favorable review (felt it was more favorable than this? bad memory I guess) of the new one, Continuum. "Waiting on the World to Change" struck me, as a member of this generation that Mayer promised will "one day" rule the population, as a major wuss-out move (the latest in many such moves that seemed to me to put sales over, for lack of a better word, interesting-ness). He had an opportunity to speak his mind in a poetic, non-grating way-- like Josh Ritter does on "Thin Blue Flame"-- but instead he again could only sing about feeling numb, impotent, and apathetic. (If you're a radio programmer, do you play the political song that takes a controversially partisan position, or the one that says, "Don't feel bad for not getting involved"?) This was bound to be a while. But it gets worse: The song was also little more, musically, than a pro-status quo interpolation of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready", a song that Bob Marley was at least honest enough to include in the title of his "One Love." Mayer must get to keep all the royalties, though, which he'd have to give up even if he were a rapper using a sample. That may not be aesthetic grounds for a good torch-and-pitchfork uprising, but as a fan who actually believes that maybe, yes we can make a difference, it showed an artist not only musically, not only politically, but philosophically out of step with what interested me. And continuing his pattern of moving from the micro to the Hallmark-card macro as a songwriter well beyond fatherly advice, he offers a song called "Belief", telling us: "We’re never gonna win the world/ We’re never gonna stop the war/ We’re never gonna beat this is/ If belief is what we’re fighting for." I forget what that song sounds like. "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room", which I think I first heard in a Hotel Cafe acoustic version, is also a far cry from his earlier songs. Then there's "Gravity". "Say". Etc. Eghck.
One time, long ago, when asked who his favorite fan was, John Mayer said me.
And when I stand on these tables before you, I will say, "Hey, look at me, I've got a record deal!"
John Mayer: Love Soon
BONUS: "No Woman No Cry"
