Better than the John Mayer interview
Jeff Fb-messaged last month to see if I was going to blog about John Mayer's ridiculous interview with Rolling Stone (""Blowing me off is the new sucking me off"). This blog has a long and proud history of Mayer Hatin', but I said, no, there was nothing else to be said. John Mayer continued to be a person desperately in need of ego check. No news.
Then the ridiculous Playboy interview broke. There was so much to be said, and the world said it. Everybody published something, and Mayer needed to apologize on stage for being awful and nearly cried. So, not much for me to say. I had just begun to wonder if Heartbreak Warfare was the second Mayer song ever I liked a little. (Here was the first.)
But now I have something worth posting! The Los Angeles Times' Ann Powers has a terrific interview with Mayer's Playboy interviewer, Rob Tannenbaum. Both the questions and answers are good reads.
From Powers, on Kanye West's award-show interruptions:
That was another case of a thirtysomething male artist at the top of his game committing "career suicide" by overstepping a boundary. It was another example of a mediated event that somehow spun out of the control of both the subject (West and Mayer) and those organizing it (MTV, you and Playboy). Both brought up touchy matters of race and gender. In both cases, the artists involved expressed great remorse almost immediately. West still remains in a kind of exile for his "terrible" deed. Will the same thing happen to Mayer? Or will this pass? And if it passes, is it partly because he's white?
From Tannenbaum, on modern content anecdotalization:
Take away his use of the "N-word," and you have a white musician commenting on the privilege of race, and warning other whites that they can't ever presume to know racial disadvantage. Harry Allen, an accomplished black writer, described this on Twitter as a "powerful, pointed statement." How many white rock stars understand that, never mind declare it? He found a stupid way to make valuable points. If he'd just left out one forbidden word and an ill-advised reference to a white supremacist (who I don't want to promote by naming), Mayer might be up for an NAACP Image Award.
The LAT reader comments after the exchange are thoughtful. You may agree with some and not others, but they hit on a number of the half-reactions you may feel while reading the interview about the interview.
Like… Do Powers and Tannenbaum overestimate Mayer's intelligence? "The playboy article reads like the rants of a manic narcissist, not some troubled, misunderstood genius." Does Tannenbaum do right by race? "The first playboy interview was conducted by Alex Haley and was an interview with Miles Davis Tannenbaum has degraded Haley's Playboy legacy." How much does interviewing method matter? "I doubt that Tannenbaum would sound as articulate, or as fatuous, if he had to answer these questions in person or over the phone." All your call.
