Salon.com > John Mayer

John Mayer offers up “Paper Doll” as your new Prancercise jam

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:54:00 +0000

John Mayer, attempting to capitalize on the "Prancercise" phenomenon that's swept the Internet, has released a new music video in which lithe Prancercise guru Joanna Rohrback glides along to his new jam, "Paper Doll."

If you haven't seen Joanna Rohrback's original workout video before, Mayer's video seems random and absurdist, a throwback to Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" or "Weapon of Choice" music videos. But if you are already familiar with the greatness that is Prancercise, it feels more like total bro John Mayer is superficially attaching himself to an Internet meme, which is kind of lame.

The trying-too-hard-to-be-funny video becomes lamer still when you realize that "Paper Doll" is most likely an outright diss to former flame Taylor Swift, whose tendency to overshare in her lyrics have already spawned jokes, Twitter parody accounts and Internet memes ad absurdum. Prancercise, you are much, much better without John Mayer:

Matt Lauer recites lyrics to John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland”

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:39:00 +0000

On last night's "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," the host played a bizarre gameshow, "Wheel of Carpet Samples," with an even more bizarre ending: "Today" show anchor Matt Lauer reciting the lyrics to John Mayer's "Your Body is a Wonderland." If this was an attempt to improve Lauer's battered public image...well...you can decide if it's working or not:

John Mayer is still gross

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 18:50:00 +0000

In case you were wondering, John Mayer is still a raging tool.

The verbally incontinent singer, currently perched atop the Billboard album chart, has been relatively quiet the past few years, ever since a series of foot-in-mouth incidents led him to announce he just should "have given that up and played the guitar." But in a new interview in Rolling Stone, he's at it once again, trash-talking about his romantic history and criticizing another woman he somehow persuaded to get with him. His latest victim? America's sweetheart, Taylor Swift. Don't call it a comeback!

We should have just pulled up our chairs for a ringside seat the minute the deeply confessional Swift locked eyes on a man who says things like "I can fire alien weapons. I can insert a tampon." How could it not end with a train wreck and a few hit singles? We'll never know exactly what went down after the two collaborated (COUGH COUGH) creatively in 2009 -- when Swift was 19 -- but the fact that a song titled "Dear John" cropped up on her next album, "Speak Now," may have been a clue.

John Mayer dumps Twitter

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:15:00 +0000

"It's not you, Twitter. It's me."

John Mayer broke up with Twitter today, deleting his account and giving up custody of more than 3.7 million followers. The split was cold and abrupt, shocking friends and family and particularly those in the media. Mayer explained Tuesday through a representative: "With the Battles Studies Tour now at a close and a return to the studio planned, John has discontinued his Twitter account."

The "I don't have time to give you the attention you deserve" routine is convenient, and granted, Mayer's focus will likely be consumed by his forthcoming album, but the writings were already on the wall. His relationship with Twitter was contentious from the start, bordering on verbal abuse. "It's inherently silly and it's inherently dumb," Mayer said in a 2009 interview with E! Online. "If you really think that Twitter is the pathway to spiritual enlightenment, well … it's one step away from sending pictures of your poop." (Ike Turner and Joe Jackson -- wherever they are -- are blushing.)

This week in crazy: John Mayer

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Last month, John Mayer appeared to be dabbling in crazy when he told Rolling Stone he was looking for "the Joshua Tree of vaginas" and recalibrated the universal TMI meter with his digressions on masturbation. But this week, Mr. Lite FM Waiting on the World to Change indisputably proved his mettle as the King of All Batshit.

In a Playboy interview with Rob Tannenbaum, Mayer let loose with a now-infamous litany of wackadoo -- most notably boasting that "Black people love me" before clarifying the meaning of "hood pass" as truly a "nigger pass" -- and then going on to describe his fondness for white chicks by saying, "My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin' David Duke cock."

Oh. No. He. Didn't.

“Parks and Recreation’s” John Mayer joke

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:13:00 +0000

In what must be the most serendipitously timed joke of the week, "Parks and Recreation" last night celebrated Valentine's Day (and its little-known spinoff, "Galentine's Day") with a straight-up bit of romantic advice. Attempting to orchestrate a reunion between her mother and mom's long-lost first love, the frequently misguided Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) looks into the camera and speaks a little truth to power.

Check out the following clip, where Leslie gushes, "How often do you get to reunite soul mates? What if I told you that you could reunite Romeo and Juliet? Or Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston?" Then she turns deadly serious, adding, "Oh, Jen, I really want you to be happy. Stay away from John Mayer."

John Mayer: A black woman responds

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:30:00 +0000

John Mayer, I had been listening to your music for four hours straight when I heard your now-famous comments about not being attracted to black women, how your "dick is sort of like a white supremacist."

That’s fine John, because millions of black legs everywhere just snapped shut. They are closed to you. Drape your penis in a white pillowcase for all we care.

The comment is only one of the offensive things you said in your Playboy interview -- like calling Jessica Simpson "sexual napalm" and casually tossing off the n-word -- but it's your joke that you have a "Benetton heart and a David Duke" dick that I want to address now. See, I don't begrudge you your sexual preferences; it's your right to screw as many cheerleaders as you want. What bothers me is that you're not the only guy who feels or acts this way. Sometimes, when I stand in a room of white men, I feel unfeminine and unsexual, no matter the strappy heels, the makeup, the dress. I know there are white men out there who find black women attractive, but you, John Mayer -- the guy down enough to be on"Chappelle's Show," the guy so sensitive he writes love songs -- now represent the ones who don't. Maybe you should think a little bit about that.

John Mayer’s Johnson hates black women

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:26:00 +0000

John Mayer has accomplished the impressive feat of making himself look like an even bigger douchebag than before. No, wait -- make that "an even bigger douchebag who also hates black women." The soulful crooner and notorious cad recently sat down with Playboy for a candid interview. So candid, in fact, that it seems like he thought because the interview was for a dirty magazine, his reckless ramblings would evade the mainstream media. It's like he forgot the Internet exists.

At one point in the meandering conversation, he proclaims, "Black people love me." I would say that it's at this point that things go south -- only things are quickly headed in that direction straight from the get-go. He continues: "Someone asked me the other day, 'What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?' And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass." I think that's meant as an irreverent joke; he should see how that goes over at a comedy club. Also: I'd love to see him try to use his "hood pass" now.

His body (of work) is a wonderland

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 20:00:00 +0000

John Mayer is the best thing to happen to vanilla sex since the missionary position. Much like the regularly maligned ice cream flavor, kinkless intercourse has always been tastier than advertised. So when the musically and sexually adventurous alike dismiss Mayer's Berklee-tutored guitar and Abercrombie-swaddled purr as aural Vicodin for soccer moms and timid schoolgirls, it only goes to show how limited a palette both kinds of fetishists have. In fact, Mayer's new "Heavier Things" is just the thing to heat your bathwater on those occasions when you don't want to get your freak on -- but you're still game for seeing where some heavy petting might lead.

Mayer sidled into the limelight two years ago with the mildly rebellious "No Such Thing," on which he insisted "I am invincible" in all but a whisper and defied the powers that be by running through his old high school -- no doubt while chewing gum, and I bet he didn't even have a hall pass either. The single sprang from his second album, "Room for Squares," an acoustic-based collection of modest romantic ruminations that stirred equally modest heart flutters in suburbs and dorms across America. Mayer was always just a twitch of the larynx away from simpering, and his ability to resist that temptation seemed (again, modestly) courageous.

Promotional intelligence

Mon, 28 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

If success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, some
brainchildren are more like foster kids: Proud parents bring their
intellectual offspring into the world, only to see them raised by
someone else. That's been the fate of emotional intelligence, an idea that was
born in academia but came of age in the public eye.
The adoptive parent, in this case, is science journalist Daniel Goleman. His
book, "Emotional Intelligence," hit the bookstores in 1995, with ambitious
claims trumpeted on its cover. "The groundbreaking book that redefines what
it means to be smart" promised to reveal why emotional intelligence "can
matter more than IQ." In a chapter titled "When Smart Is Dumb," Goleman explained that "there are widespread exceptions to
the rule that IQ predicts success -- many (or more) exceptions than cases
that fit the rule," adding that "one of psychology's open secrets is the
relative inability of grades, IQ or SAT scores, despite their popular
mystique, to predict unerringly who will succeed in life."