Battle Studies

As guitar-slinging pop icon John Mayer hurriedly crams all of his limbs into his mouth at once this week, virally infecting blogs around the world, the easily-distracted, dangerously idle and morally indignant ask generously of themselves, Can we understand his mistake? Can we see it as a function of his profession and his bad-boy image, or only of his privilege and ignorance?

As a pop singer, it is possible to see him as the latest victim of his industry; a member of a guild that peddles a sucralose-sweet simulacrum of sex to a predominantly adolescent or chaste demographic. As the singer inhabits this hyper-sexualized realm of non-experience alongside the fan, they too must mistake its frustrated symbolism for a kind of exchange. The singer is part of an elaborate, euphemistic game that adolescents are hardly aware that they are playing. The supervisory figure of the singer, however puerile their adopted symbolism may be, is trusted to know better, and John Mayer's public disgrace is one example of what happens when they do not.

Mayer thinks that he has actually been singing about sex this entire time. So when he opens up his mouth to speak candidly (which means naughtily) about the same, he is astonished to discover that this has not once been the case. Sexual language is often an elaborately coded litany of taboos, and it must above all else have the character of contraband – that is, it must be comprised of words that one has in their possession illicitly. There are fewer of these available to the would-be shit-talking libertine than ever these days, so certain choice words have been imported from the dark (and sadly, ongoing) parallel histories of racial and sexual persecution.

Similarly, his use of the word “nigger” is telling; as an interpreter of the blues, he discovers that he has not in fact sung the blues proper at any point in his career. But it can't be that simple. Decades into a campaign of formal reclamation, the word “nigger” comprises a very different gesture in the parlance of today's pop culture than at any prior point in American history. It makes no sense whatsoever to proceed as though white America, John Mayer included, can't have noticed this shift. The above may, however, have misinterpreted its significance.

As contemporary rap music parodies its own guiding value, namely authenticity, it functions as does the aforementioned parody of sex presented by pop culture – as a deterrent and a substitute, an initiation into and a judgment on a way of life. It's easy to say that it glamourizes its subject matter, but purely aesthetic violence has a correspondingly diminished visceral impact. It becomes a game, and a game which carries over into white and suburban life, even as its elements are organized in emulation of a world elsewhere. Hence in the game are rules which may seem arbitrary, but are elsewhere non-negotiable. In its originary context, which is the complex fraternity of certain African American males, the epithet of “nigger” may have meant one thing, but in the popular culture, it is, even when used to denote a similiar sense of fraternity, essentially a sex word. It titillates because it smacks of degradation, even though its proper use is only where one feels completely safe in deploying it. As certain commentators wonder why so little fuss has been made over his use of the word “fag” elsewhere in the same article, one might suggest that it is not because it displays a more socially acceptable prejudice (which it does), but that it is a less transgressive fetish word.

Perhaps here John Mayer can be found seeking erotic thrills, again through the play of euphemism, only this time without realizing it at all. But where better for an overeager sensualist to show his tail than in the pages of Playboy? And how different to be caught with your pants down on every computer screen in the country than it is just to sing about it.