His Stupid Mouth: Why I Still Love John Mayer

At some point in his life, every serious music fan has liked an artist before that artist became famous and successful. We love being among the handful of people to attend his shows and enjoy even more introducing our friends to obscure, new music. But when that artist does become successful, despite all of our former proselytizing on his behalf, we inevitably turn on him. The more successful he becomes, the more vicious our condemnations. I am certainly not immune to this phenomenon, in fact, it has happened to me many times. But there is one artist for whom this effect was particularly pronounced, due in part to the extreme fame he has reached and in part to the intensity of the connection that I felt to his music prior to his success. As I'm sure you were able to glean by the title of this post, that artist was John Mayer.* And although I no longer enjoy his new music, I haven't exactly turned on him. I'll try to explain what I mean after the jump.

As a young, socially awkward fifteen year old attending high school in the suburbs of Atlanta at the turn of the millennium who felt more comfortable collecting all 120 stars in Super Mario 64 to collecting girls' phone numbers, John Mayer was my champion. It wasn't just that he referenced local thoroughfares like Peachtree Street and I-85 in his songs or that you could get in to see him at Eddie's Attic with $8 and a ride to Decatur, it was that he understood me.

Songs like "No Such Thing" made me feel OK to operate outside of the faded white hat set by providing assurances that my full potential could only be achieved when not constrained by the halls of my high school. "Neon" and "Comfortable" were odes to the sensitive guy's love for the troubled or quirky outsider girl. "Why Georgia"? Indeed. But of all of Mayer's early-career gems, it was "My Stupid Mouth" that I found personally relatable on an almost eerie level. In particular, the scene in which he nervously fidgets with the salt and pepper shakers while trying to come up with something to say to a girl that he has just inadvertently offended was a page taken directly out of my playbook. As I would soon find out, millions upon millions of people felt the same way.

Surely you'll forgive me for having felt bad about this. The realization that one's feelings are not as special and personal as they once seemed makes one feel insignificant and indeed foolish for having put so much stock into those feelings. It is only natural to project this negativity onto the person who helped you recognize and analyze those feelings in the first place. Hence, I was throwing many a subliminal "fuck you" Mayer's way when Room for Squares blew up.

This is not to say that I didn't like the album in spite of myself. Although I frequently bemoaned the fact that Mayer eschewed the blue eyed soul of Inside Wants Out for the super saccharine top-40 treatments of his major label debut, I had to admit that the songcraft was still there. His keen sense of melody and universally relatable themes remained undeniable. He followed up Room for Squares with Heavier Things and although the pitch-perfect hooks were in less supply, he still kept me interested for at least half the record and managed to include a few songs that I still love today.**

Unfortunately, this (in my opinion) would signal the beginning of a steady decline in quality among his subsequent releases. The aptly named Try! was a naked credibility grab, Continuum was aggressively bland, his three live albums were mostly inessential, and by the time he released Battle Studies in late 2009, I found his music almost completely unlistenable. To be fair, I have changed a great deal since I discovered Mayer as a sophomore in high school, and my musical tastes have changed along with me, but I just can't shake the feeling that his heart is no longer in his music. I couldn't relate anymore, and I'm certain that I'm not alone.

But while his music became increasingly less compelling, his public persona followed an opposite trajectory . The local struggling musician I used to know became one of those famous people. At first, I resented him for it. Jessica fucking Simpson? Are you kidding me? She seemed to be the polar opposite of the type of girls we longed for together in "Neon" and "Comfortable." Who was this guy sleeping with beautiful women and constantly bragging about it to whoever would listen? What happened to you, John Mayer? You used to be one of us.

Male high school nerds construct elaborate personas for themselves. We tend to date a small number of girls in our scholastic careers, not because we're too scared to constantly approach multiple women, but because we can't. We're only interested in real connections. We're about romance and true love; things that matter. We operate outside of the in-crowd not because we lack the self esteem to get people to like us, but because we're too intelligent and complicated to appeal to the masses.

Of course, these are all lies that we told ourselves in order to feel better about our social failings, and John Mayer's early music served to completely validate them. Once I got old enough to recognize these lies for what they were, I stopped resenting John Mayer. He had not become just another fake famous person, as I had initially assumed. He was in fact the exact same John Mayer, only famous. He was a nerd with opportunity and he was taking full advantage. He was doing exactly the same things I would do if awkward high school me had suddenly become rich and famous; it would be completely ridiculous to hate him for it.

So I found myself at peace with famous John Mayer. I found his actions as a famous person to be authentic, even if his music no longer was. I liked him again. And when he got a Twitter account, the old flame was completely rekindled. I started to feel like I knew him again. Mayer is truly a master of the 140 character social medium.

My relationship with John Mayer has now come full circle. Beyond the bit about the salt and pepper shakers, the most telling line from "My Stupid Mouth" is painfully, plaintively direct: "I just want to be liked/I just want to be funny." Over a decade after he wrote this line, you would be hard pressed to find something so honest in his music today, but he communicates it loud and clear every day on his Twitter account.

My friend Ben and I recently had a conversation about how we were both way more excited to read his Playboy interview than we were to listen to Battle Studies. We realized that we feel this way because interviews and Twitter posts are the only places that you can get "My Stupid Mouth" era John Mayer anymore. He still can't help offending women with the ridiculous shit that he says, only now, instead of doing it over a dinner date, he's doing it on a world stage for everyone to see. His public persona has evolved into a kind of living performance art. His music isn't honest anymore, but he is. Back when he was a struggling local musician, we only had access to Mayer through his music, but now we have complete access through paparazzi journalism, interviews, and his Twitter account. And that's why I still love John Mayer. He's still as relatable and real and embarrassingly honest as he always was, it just no longer has anything to do with his music.

His stupid mouth? Fully intact.

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* Please try to hold in your laughter.

** Most notably, "Clarity," which I still listen to regularly.