Soliloquy

Society does not like John Mayer.

In a world teeming with mediocrity of all sorts, the music of John Mayer seems filled with the pain that men usually fail to articulate. What men usually resort to, otherwise, are modes of self-destruction other than those of creativity and end up fulfilling prophecies that few dare to achieve. Drugs and alcohol are but excesses of one kind; if one were to go deep inside the psyche of those tormented but failing to, one would find a rabbit hole deeper than what the Mad Hatter had once intended for Alice – not in chains, as it turned out.

Mayer, for his part, delivers with the polish unbecoming of a man who has lived most of his life above a guileless radar that could not understand his existence. If it was hard enough to challenge opinions put across by statements and interviews by a media seemingly blind to this naive brainiac, it was harder still to come to terms with the melodies that his bleeding guitar threw up for those unable to see the stye in the eye of the woman in rags across the street. Melodies and men – as it so often happens – do not go hand in hand.

For anyone doubting the veracity of such words, and for anyone seemingly unable to come to conclusions even after discouraging incursions deep inside the mind of a five-year-old unable to grasp the alphabet, the opening of ‘Gravity’ from Mayer’s album Continuum should put things to bed. If there is any bit of mental genius that can match the opening of ‘Solid Air’ by the late John Martyn from his eponymous album, it is that of ‘Gravity.’ It fills one with fresh air, and delivers lungful after lungful of it without any sort of acclaim whatsoever.

The question, then is, what kind of treatment ought to be meted out to Mayer, or men of similar genius? Little has changed in society, or among the personal laws of men, since the fictional Ellsworth Toohey wrote Sermons in Stone in 1927 and the same anxieties trouble them when faced with works of immense intellect that fail to live up to the benchmarks of mediocrity that they have legislated for themselves. Men like Mayer, then, are held to be criminals in a society that has not been able to look brilliance in the eye without feeling a sense of guilt.

And what is to be made of that sense of guilt that evades everyone but that of the most purposeful of men intent on keeping up with the challenges that they set for themselves? What is to be made of the senseless idea of pleasure that this man sees as nothing but an obstacle, that his soul keeps reminding him to get rid of, for no sense of amusement can equal the rest or joy that he captures after his work has been seen for the greatness it merits? The equitable solution, then, for everyone concerned, is to ban Mayer’s – or an equally gifted genius’ – work from this world and prevent anyone from trying to attend to it.

No one should be allowed to come within a mile of works of such eminence to prevent the latter from being contaminated from the chicken-pox-like touch of men unable to love themselves or their work. Seemingly ostracised by those whom they sought to ostracise in the first place which they failed on account of the fear that their baseless actions did not generate. For society is not worthy of the music that Mayer has produced, and it never will be. No one is worthy enough of what he, or men of similar genius, continue to produce. Therefore, it is not society, but Mayer who ought to be kept away from the former.

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